Azure is becoming the first AI supercomputer, says Microsoft | Hacker News Reader

Azure is becoming the first AI supercomputer, says Microsoft

zdnet.com

27 pointsjonbaer17 comments

Azure is becoming the first [MARKETING BUZZ] says microsoft

> When you think about machine learning, especially deep neural nets, it turns out GPUs are much better at performance and scale for those algorithms

Perhaps we should stop calling them GPUs. Now seems a good time for it.

Like DVDs, the name is kind of stuck. There, they switched from Digital Video Discs to Digital Versatile Discs. How about switching your mind from Graphics Processing Units to General-purpose Processing Units?

Also known as GPGPU.

GPU - General Purpose Unit ;)

What do you propose we call them?

Geometric Processing Units? The "magic" of this renaissance in GPU processing seems mostly to just be the (maybe unsurprising) versatility of Euclidean Geometry to a wide variety of problem domains.

Parallel Processing Units?

Hyper-Parallel Independent Processing Units?

Standard Hyperparallel Integrated Technology?

I do so love fun with acronyms...

Vector Processing Units

It does a good job of communicating their main functionality.

What do you propose we call them?

AIPUs

Marketing links should be banned.

Yep. Marketing articles: they're like half a technical article. The half that's missing is the proof that it's real, and the link to the github so you can see the code. They've both been replaced by hype.

Google Search's cluster is arguably more of an AI supercomputer than anything M$ has offered thus far

Sure it is.

And shortly after it achieves self-awareness, it will seek out anybody named Sarah Connor, and ask them if they need any help since it looks like they're writing a letter.

It's a weird world we live in where a marketing headline sounds like the voiceover introducing a cyberpunk dystopia.

And http://www.sourcecodeonline.com/details/ghost_perl_webserver... is ready to run on Azure.

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