Cirrascale Cloud Services® is excited to announce Graphcloud. The service is a collaboration between Cirrascale and Graphcore® offering customers access to Graphcore’s tightly integrated hardware and software IPU-POD scale-out platform using second generation GC200 Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) and Poplar® software stack.
Graphcloud is the first publicly available Mk2 IPU-POD scale-out cluster, offering a simple way to add compute capacity on-demand, without the need to own and operate a data center. Graphcloud achieves record-breaking performance when compared to the latest GPUs, including 2x faster time to train for BERT-Large for NLP, state of the art accuracy and performance with EfficientNet for Computer Vision and orders of magnitude improvements for training probabilistic models like MCMC.
IPU-POD16 and IPU-POD64 systems are currently available with Graphcloud and can be accessed in weekly or monthly flat-rate allotments with discounts offered for longer-term use with predictable pricing and no extra charges. Additionally, the Graphcloud platform can easily integrate with a customer’s current online cloud-based workflow at various hyperscalers creating a secure, multi-cloud solution.
As Graphcore shared on their blog earlier today, one of the first Graphcore customers to use Graphcloud was UK-based Healx, whose artificial intelligence platform for drug discovery is identifying new treatments for rare diseases. The company was named ‘Best Use of AI in Health and Medicine’ at the 2019 AI Awards.
Dan O’Donovan, Technical Lead, Machine Learning Engineering at Healx said, "We began using an IPU-POD16 on Graphcloud in late December 2020, porting our existing Mk1 IPU code to run on the Mk2 system - a frictionless process that delivered a huge performance advantage. Having more memory available for our models meant we no longer needed to shard our model and could focus on sharding our data instead."
Customers can begin using the Graphcloud IPU-POD instances or can learn more about how to purchase their own IPU-POD for on-premise use by visiting graphcloud.ai.
