When trying to make a purchase with a shopping app, we may quickly browse the recommendation list while admitting that the machine does know about us—at least, it is learning to do so. As an effective emerging technology, machine learning (ML) has become pretty much pervasive with an application spectrum ranging from miscellaneous apps to supercomputing.

Dedicated ML computers are thus being developed at various scales, but their productivity is somewhat limited: the workload and development cost are largely concentrated in their software stacks, which need to be developed or reworked on an ad hoc basis to support every scaled model.

To solve the problem, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) proposed a fractal parallel computing model and published their research in Intelligent Computing on Sept. 5.

A multi-institution research team has developed an optical chip that can train machine learning hardware. Their research is published today in Optica.

Machine learning applications have skyrocketed to $165 billion annually, according to a recent report from McKinsey. But before a machine can perform intelligence tasks such as recognizing the details of an image, it must be trained. Training of modern-day artificial intelligence (AI) systems like Tesla’s autopilot costs several million dollars in electric power consumption and requires supercomputer-like infrastructure.

This surging AI “appetite” leaves an ever-widening gap between computer hardware and demand for AI. Photonic integrated circuits, or simply optical chips, have emerged as a possible solution to deliver higher computing performance, as measured by the number of operations performed per second per watt used, or TOPS/W. However, though they’ve demonstrated improved core operations in machine intelligence used for data classification, photonic chips have yet to improve the actual front-end learning and machine training process.

At the time, all this was theoretical. But last week, the company announced they’d linked 16 CS-2s together into a world-class AI supercomputer.

Meet Andromeda

The new machine, called Andromeda, has 13.5 million cores capable of speeds over an exaflop (one quintillion operations per second) at 16-bit half precision. Due to the unique chip at its core, Andromeda isn’t easily compared to supercomputers running on more traditional CPUs and GPUs, but Feldman told HPC Wire Andromeda is roughly equivalent to Argonne National Laboratory’s Polaris supercomputer, which ranks 17th fastest in the world, according to the latest Top500 list.