Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella reveals that Microsoft Azure is becoming the first AI Supercomputer at this time. People could have thought that it was just a computing cloud service, but Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform is the company’s one of the most research-intensive sections which are already in its approach to become the first artificial intelligence super computer.
At an event in Dublin, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella discussed how Microsoft’s cloud computing service is becoming the first AI supercomputer. Microsoft’s huge and popular cloud platform is about to power to the next generation of applications and it has arrived as ” Microsoft’s Money-Making Machine”. The company has clinched many Linux-based technologies to attract more users to Azure.
This means building cloud processing power will not just use traditional CPU but GPUs as well. GPUs are good for dealing with these workloads because they can be extended out so that banks of GPUs can handle tasks in parallel. Nadella repeated the same and said that GPUs are much better at performing with deep neural net algorithms.
Nadella also said that every computes node of Azure across all regions has FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), which means that developers can write neural network codes by distributing it across the FPGA fabric and run it at the speed of silicon.
Apart from Azure’s AI-focussed architecture, Microsoft is also offering higher level services that will help to build AI applications and services . Developers can use APIs to connect to speech, image, object recognition and natural language processing services.
AI applications can frequently look simple to the user but needs a huge amount of processing power at the back end, so the big cloud hawkers are anxious to set themselves as having the best and popular platform for this high profile and compute-intensive workloads.
Microsoft has been pushing its own AI projects too – from digital personal assistant Cortana to add AI smarts to Office 365 and Dynamics 365 for sales. Microsoft also declared that it will be offering Azure Cloud from French data centers sometime following year.
