Graphcore announced a collaboration for its Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) with Microsoft Azure. This is the first time a major public cloud vendor is offering Graphcore IPUs, which are built from the ground up to support next-generation machine learning. Microsoft and Graphcore have been collaborating closely for over two years, developing systems and enhancing advanced machine vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP) models on IPUs.
One of the early access customers in the financial industry is Citadel. Daniele Scarpazza, R&D team lead for High Performance Computing at Citadel, said in a statement: “A big focus for us at Citadel is leveraging cutting edge technology to optimize the investment process across a range of strategies and asset classes. We believe that constantly reevaluating and improving the technology we offer our investment teams helps us stay ahead of our competition. We are very excited to be working with Graphcore as one of its early access partners to test the possible applications of the new processor technology within our business. The Graphcore IPU has been designed from the ground up for machine learning and its novel architecture is already enabling us to explore new techniques that have been inefficient or simply not possible before.”