IBM has installed its latest supercomputer AiMOS at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. AiMOS should help develop new artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
The supercomputer has a speed of 8 petaflops and can therefore perform eight quadrillion calculations per second, says Silicon Angle. That would make AiMOS the most powerful supercomputer in a private university.
AiMOS is ranked 24th in the list of most powerful individual computer systems. It uses the same power supply architecture as the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the Summit and the Sierra. These computers are owned by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Making AI systems increasingly efficient
IBM wants to make artificial intelligence systems “a thousand times more efficient” over the next ten years. Rensselaer University wants to use AiMOS to do more research on AI.
It needs the system to develop better chips and other systems, writes Silicon Angle. Artificial intelligence requires particularly powerful machines. AiMOS has to construct the models and perform the simulations and calculations needed to build powerful CPUs and GPUs, among other things.
IBM calls this “special purpose systems” and sees it as a great opportunity for artificial intelligence.
But Rensselaer is going to deploy AiMOS in more areas. The supercomputer will have to support existing projects, such as the Lake George environmental monitoring system in New York. This will result in nine terabyte of information each year.
IBM supercomputers
Summit and Sierra, the two supercomputers that AiMOS resembles, also come from IBM. Summit could hypothetically even reach top speeds of 200 petaflops.
This supercomputer consists of more than 4,600 servers and can solve a problem in one hour that an average desktop takes thirty years to solve. That costs a lot: the Summit cooling system consumes 15,000 litres of water per minute.