Microsoft and Graphcore collaborate to accelerate Artificial Intelligence

The Microsoft IPU Cloud Preview on Azure - the world's first IPU cloud service is the first commercial hyperscale cloud to have launched with a new class of silicon processor built from the ground up to support the next generation of machine intelligence applications.

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The world's first IPU preview on Azure is now open

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Introducing the world's first Graphcore IPU server

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Check out our State of The Art Benchmarks

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BENCHMARKS

State of the Art with today’s large, complex models

Natural Language Processing - BERT

We have achieved state of the art performance and accuracy with the BERT language model, training BERT Base in 56 hours with seven C2 IPU-Processor PCIe cards, each with two IPUs, in an IPU Server system. With BERT inference, we see 3x higher throughput with over 20% improvement in latency to serve up results faster than ever.

Image Classification - ResNext

Graphcore C2 IPU-Processor PCIe card achieves 3.4x higher throughput at 20x lower latency compared to a leading alternative processor. High throughput at the lowest possible latency is key in many of the important use cases today.

Girish Bablani

Corporate Vice President, Azure Compute at Microsoft Corp.

“Natural language processing models are hugely important to Microsoft – to run our internal AI workloads and for our AI customers on Microsoft Azure. We are extremely excited by the potential that this new collaboration on processors with Graphcore will deliver for our customers. The Graphcore offering extends Azure’s capabilities and our efforts here form part of our strategy to ensure that Azure remains the best cloud for AI.”
Daniele Scarpazza

R&D Team Lead

"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."
Eric Leandri

CEO

“Our research team at Qwant works at the cutting edge of AI to quickly deliver the best possible results on our users search queries while ensuring the results are neutral, impartial and accurate. It’s a tall order. We see millions of searches each day for images alone. We have been working closely with Microsoft and Graphcore to use IPU processor technology in the Azure Cloud and are seeing a significant improvement – with 3.5x higher performance - in our image search capability using ResNext on IPUs, out of the box. There is huge potential for innovation with Graphcore IPUs on new machine intelligence models and we are working on these approaches to refine our search results so that we can deliver exactly what our customers are looking for.”
Prof. Andrew Davison

Professor of Robot Vision, Department of Computing

“We believe new processor technology is going to play a key part in the evolution of Spatial AI and SLAM in the near future and have been excited to get early research access to Graphcore’s innovative new hardware. Fully general Spatial AI will require sparse probabilistic and geometric reasoning on graphs as well as computations with deep neural nets. By paying as much attention to communication as computation, Graphcore have created a new scalable architecture which we believe has the potential to execute all these algorithms with low latency and power efficiency.”