IBM Power 9 systems at MIT

An $11.6 million artificial intelligence computing cluster donated by IBM to MIT will come online this fall at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, Massachusetts. It is great to collaborate with Professors in MIT where AI Related research started in late 1960.

A little background about AI at MIT

In the late 60s, Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert of the MIT AI Laboratory proposed that AI research should focus on artificially simple situations known as micro-worlds. They pointed out that in successful sciences like physics, basic principles were often best understood using simplified models like friction less planes or perfectly rigid bodies. Much of the research focused on a "blocks world," which consists of colored blocks of various shapes and sizes arrayed on a flat surface.

This paradigm led to innovative work in machine vision by Gerald Sussman (who led the team), Adolfo Guzman, David Waltz (who invented "constraint propagation"), and especially Patrick Winston. At the same time, Minsky and Papert built a robot arm that could stack blocks, bringing the blocks world to life. The crowning achievement of the micro-world program was Terry Winograd's SHRDLU. It could communicate in ordinary English sentences, plan operations and execute them.

Powerful IBM Powered AI system at MIT

IBM Power 9 cluster called Satori at MIT , a Zen Buddhism term for “sudden enlightenment.” Physically the size of a shipping container, Satori is intellectually closer to a Ferrari, capable of zipping through 2 quadrillion calculations per second. That’s the equivalent of each person on Earth performing more than 10 million multiplication problems each second for an entire year, making Satori nimble enough to join the middle ranks of the world’s 500 fastest computers.

Key researchers and faculties in MIT also have got access to IBM designed AI Super computer Summit, the fastest supercomputer on Earth, to run the calculation-intensive models that power modern artificial intelligence (AI). Now MIT is having a slice of it .