From planning a Disneyland trip to troubleshooting a 21-year-old freezer, I’ve been leveraging AI in surprising ways lately. In my latest article, I share three use cases where AI has positively changed outcomes, proving it’s more than just a flashy buzzword.

Nvidia's latest roadmap was teased at Computex in Taiwan last month. Whilst details were a little light on PFLOPS and TDP for either the GPU or CPU, we did get some interesting information for the next-gen products.

The second hour of the Keynote focused on Apple Intelligence. By leveraging the high performing neural engines and acceleration in their own silicon, Apple have essentially got AI at the Edge, your pocket. The reality hits hard though - AI needs fast memory, and for Apple, it's at least 8GB of it.

I've discovered that business owner's and decision makers appreciate my superpower of distilling complexity into terms that are easily understood, regardless of their technical background. The pace of technological advancements often creates a divide between industry and the enterprise, and my goal is to bridge that gap.

The Open Compute Project (OCP) Regional Summit was hosted in Lisbon, Portugal last month, the 5th (and largest) regional summit the group has hosted.

Whilst I wasn't able to make it in person, I’d be remiss if I didn't write a (very) quick summary about the conference, and pertinent updates to scaling digital infrastructure in a sustainable way.

The hot topic continues to be GenAI, such that OCP has created a new track for Artificial Intelligence, and a strategic initiative for Open AI Systems (no, not THAT OpenAI), promoting open rack-level systems comprising of hardware, firmware, management and validation.

The tidal wave of Generative AI (GenAI) has mostly consisted of training large language models (LLM's), like GPT-4, and the huge amount of compute needed to process these enormous datasets, e.g. GPT-4 has 1.76 trillion parameters.

This compute has mainly looked like NVIDIA's GPUs, but you also need...

1. power

2. networking

3. capital, AND

4. a nice cool place to host them (data center)

Blackwell was the star of the show, with the B100, B200 and GB200 chips announced. Note that there were no consumer facing graphics cards (RTX) were named, nor was there a successor to the L40S or BlueField3 DPU (though there was a new ConnectX8 NIC).

As always though, a little bit of devil is in the details - as well as marketing waxing lyrically in the keynote. More on that at the end.

Next week, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang will take the stage at the SAP Center in San Jose to showcase the company's vision for the next year, and likely (see below) a few announcements too.

Expectations are sky-high, like NVIDIA's stock price, which is up ~278% since GTC 2023.

In the evolving landscape of data center technology, the demand for efficient and sustainable cooling solutions continues to grow. With the emergence of GenAI infrastructure and its increased computational demands and heat generation, the need for innovative cooling techniques has become more pronounced.

With looming regulation, both on data center sustainability and AI in general, I wanted to give an early 2024 summary of all the movement in the advanced cooling technology space.

After what felt like the 24th month of 2023, I enjoyed some much-needed downtime with my family, and starting the new year refreshed where I expect 2024 to be a big year across the board - and especially for the industries that I am fortunate to work across.

If you are looking for the first half, check out my OCP 2023 Wrap (1 of 2)

For the second (and final) half, I'm concentrating on Immersion + Sustainability (which go hand-in-hand), and Disaggregation.

I didn't exactly plan for the sheer quantity of sessions that I would be interested in, and after going down numerous rabbit holes, I plucked out roughly 50 or so relating to data center cooling, high-speed networking, and sustainability, with the hot-topic and undercurrent, without question, being AI.

Posting about today's #microsoftignite2023 announcement in Seattle, from #sc23 in Denver, while finishing an article on #ocpsummit23 in San Jose is frankly...a little meta - but here we go.

It's a collaboration across the tech community, focused on redesigning technology to support the changing demands on infrastructure. With roots at Facebook circa 2009, a team challenged with supporting an exploding social media platform designed a more efficient to build and run, an at scale infrastructure. This innovation was an integral part of initiation of the OCP Foundation in 2011.

As a former Amazonian, hearing that acronym triggered a visceral, PTSD-like reaction for me. In Amazon's lexicon, CoE stands for 'Correction of Errors'.

While a Center of Excellence emphasizes knowledge sharing, training and development, collaboration and innovation, there are notable synergies between the two concerning operational excellence.

Let's face it, technology isn't just a small piece of the business puzzle anymore; it's a potential game-changer that can make or break a company.

Enter the dynamic duo of the tech world: the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Whilst these two roles can be very similar, they're actually quite different beasts, each playing a unique role in shaping how businesses navigate and thrive in the digital age.

Optimal performance, heat transfer efficiency, and system longevity hinge upon the selection of the most suitable immersion fluid. Attributes like high thermal conductivity, low viscosity, and exceptional dielectric properties are non-negotiable in ensuring effective heat removal.

While typically referred to as Oil, immersion cooling uses dielectric fluids to cool IT load - a non-corrosive, non-conductive liquid and either non-flammable or very high flashpoint, that has the viscosity of a mineral or baby oil.

In my last article, I discussed what a GPU was and primarily covered NVIDIAs history and product suite. While NVIDIA GPUs have long been the go-to choice for these AI workloads, there have been a host of alternative options, both GPU and other, simmering away, mostly behind the scenes.

The history of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) is a fascinating journey that begins with their humble origins as tools for enhancing 3D graphics in video games. These early GPUs (then called 3D accelerators) such as the 3dfx Voodoo2 released in 1998, laid the foundation for what would become a transformative force in computing technology.