Spell Partners with Graphcore to Deliver Next Generation AI Infrastructure for Lower TCO and Faster Time-to-Value

Offers Free On-demand Trial of Graphcore's IPU-POD AI Platform

NEW YORK and BRISTOL, England, Feb. 8, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Spell, the leader in operationalizing AI for natural language processing (NLP), machine vision, and speech recognition applications, and Graphcore, maker of the Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) for next-generation AI compute, have announced a partnership to deliver the next generation of AI infrastructure. 

The new solution integrates Graphcore's IPU-POD scale-out systems with Spell's eponymous hardware-agnostic MLOps software platform for deep learning (DLOps) to make advanced AI development faster, easier, and less expensive.

With the emergence of AI based on large neural nets, transformers, and other advanced AI models, there is a growing demand for more specialized AI compute instances, like Graphcore IPU systems, to accelerate model training, lower cost and enable new breakthroughs in ML.  Conventional MLOps tools for traditional machine learning do not provide the abstraction and automation needed to enable and assure compliance, reproducibility, and resource management, both human and computational, for deep learning AI.

To overcome these challenges, Graphcore and Spell are delivering a comprehensive deep learning platform that is powerful, easy-to-use, and highly cost-effective. And they are offering a free trial of this powerful hardware and software combination to commercial AI practitioners and academic researchers.

Graphcore's IPU has consistently demonstrated its ability to accelerate the most widely used AI models and workloads, while also unlocking new directions in artificial intelligence, made possible by its unique processor, system architecture and mature Poplar software stack.

Graphcore will utilize Spell to provide developers free access (limited to 6 hours of total compute time) to both interactive Jupyter notebooks and direct remote execution to run IPUs in the cloud, supported by  a range of quickstart code tutorials leveraging popular AI models, including natural language models (e.g., BERT), computer vision models (e.g., EfficientNet, ResNet) and Graph Neural Networks (e.g., temporal graph networks).

"Graphcore is delighted to be partnering with Spell in our shared mission to broaden access to artificial intelligence, while accelerating its progress. Spell Workspaces make it easier than ever before for developers to try out the IPU and experience the Graphcore advantage first-hand," said Graphcore CEO, Nigel Toon, adding, "Our integration with the Spell platform more broadly means that Graphcore can simply and seamlessly deliver leading-edge AI compute as part of the rich and expanding Spell ecosystem."

Spell has been recognized by Gartner, Forrester, and others as an AI infrastructure pioneer for its unique end-to-end software platform's ability to orchestrate and automate the entire AI workflow, and provide users with a single, common interface that hides the complexity and differences of underlying hardware and systems software.

With integrated support for the Graphcore IPU, Spell's AI infrastructure platform now gives Spell users transparent access to state-of-the-art AI acceleration for existing and new workloads.

"We are pleased to collaborate with Graphcore to produce powerful next-generation AI infrastructure that meets the needs of deep learning practitioners for quickly delivering the most advanced AI applications at scale," said Serkan Piantino, co-founder & CEO of Spell. "And our self-guided free trial means it could not be easier for users to get hands-on with this solution to see what it can do for them."

AI researchers and practitioners can learn more and sign up for the free trial at Graphcore & Spell.

About Spell

Founded in 2017 by world-renowned AI experts, Spell operationalizes deep learning at scale with its unique DLOps platform, which is rapidly gaining adoption and recognition for its ability to improve the time-to-value and ROI for computer vision, NLP, speech recognition, and other advanced AI applications.

Spell achieved $15 million in Series A funding led by Two Sigma Ventures and Eclipse Ventures.  The Spell platform is in production deployment in leading enterprises in Finance, Biotech, and others, and innovative AI startups in a host of industries.  Learn more: https://spell.ml/.

About Graphcore

Graphcore is the inventor of the Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), the world's most sophisticated microprocessor, specifically designed for the needs of current and next-generation artificial intelligence workloads. Graphcore's IPU-POD data center systems, for scale up and scale out AI compute, offer the ability to run large models across multiple IPUs, or to share the compute resource between different users and workloads.

Since its founding in 2016, Graphcore has raised more than $730 million in funding. Investors include Sequoia Capital, Microsoft, Dell, Samsung, BMW iVentures, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, as well as leading AI innovators including Demis Hassabis (Deepmind), Pieter Abbeel (UC Berkeley), and Zoubin Ghahramani (Google Brain). More information can be found at https://www.graphcore.ai.