The rapid adoption of automation, driven by artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies, has ushered in a wave of fresh opportunities. Organizations of all sizes across the globe are embracing automation as a means to generate significant value.

Texas Advanced Computing Center is building Stampede3, an Intel-based supercomputing system with 560 new nodes and liquid cooling, according to Tommy Minyard (pictured), director of advanced computing systems at TACC. TACC operates and maintains a system to support scientific research at the University of Texas and beyond, with plans to incorporate new Intel Vecchio GPUs for experimentation.

“It’s exciting, it’s many generations, and we’re going to operate the system for five years and it’s going to have a pretty long life,” Minyard said. “We’re excited about the offer and we will have some of the new Intel Vecchio GPUs as a kind of experimentation in that system as well.”

Minyard spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier, Lisa Martin and Savannah Peterson at SC23, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how TACC is at the forefront of supercomputing and AI and machine learning research, leveraging new technologies and open standards to drive innovation and address challenges in data. (* Disclosure below.)

Scaling adoption

AI and high-performance computing intersect, leveraging high-bandwidth interconnects for scaling, mainstream adoption for product development and potential for new access and enablement, Minyard explained. AI and ML are shifting towards using proxy models for quick iteration and optimization. The challenge lies in obtaining clean data for training.

“What’s going to be interesting from our point of view is a lot of what we’ve supported in the past has been simulation and just being able to model through equations what we think the physics of the world is and everything,” Minyard said. “What we’re going to see with AI is taking surrogate models, smaller approaches where you can very quickly iterate and optimize to a specific answer and solution.”

TACC is introducing a large-scale Arm system to provide options and variety for users, as the Arm ecosystem software is now able to support scientific applications with the Grace processor, Minyard explained. Open standards are crucial for innovation and building new software on top of existing platforms. TACC is a proponent of making its software open and providing source code to the community.

“We do explore a lot of new technologies, try to evaluate what’s going to be coming, and because of that, we know our users,” Minyard said. “One type of system may not work well for them. We want to offer options and variety. AMD’s got some good platforms and works really well on certain things. Intel’s work on some things. Nvidia GPUs are good for something. Vista is following on to all that technology. It’ll be our very first large-scale Arm system.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of SC23:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for SC23. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the main sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE