SPCL_Bcast: Oskar Mencer, Programming Groq LPUs without IEEE Floating Point, Thursday, 2nd May, 6PM CET
by Marcin Chrapek
Oskar Mencer
The Scalable Parallel Computing Lab's *SPCL_Bcast* seminar continues
with *Oskar Mencer**of **Groq* presenting on *Programming Groq LPUs
without IEEE Floating Point*. Everyone is welcome to attend (over Zoom)!
*When:* Thursday, 2nd May, 6PM CET
*Where:* Zoom
Join <https://spcl.inf.ethz.ch/Bcast/join>
*Abstract:* The IEEE standard has been a great advance in the early days
of software. In these early days, the speed of software development was
imperative. The Intel x86 instruction set became a standard as well as
IEEE Floating point. Today, we have the first commodity computing
application, the LLM, and others are rapidly following. In the commodity
economy, efficiency and cost become the utmost imperative. As we are
giving up on the x86 instruction set, we have to also consider custom
number representations for each variable in our programs, opening the
world of Physics and Computer Science to a new dimension in computing
(as predicted in my talk at ETH in 2000). In this talk I will cover how
to find the (locally) optimal range and precision for each variable, and
how to optimally utilize custom precision arithmetic units in modern
leading compute chips such as the Groq LPU.
*Biography:* Oskar Mencer got a PhD in Computer Engineering from
Stanford University in 2000, interviewed unsuccessfully at ETH for an
Assistant Professor position, joined Bell Labs 1127, then became EPSRC
Advanced Fellow at Imperial, started Maxeler Technologies, and later got
major investments among others from JP Morgan and CME Group. Maxeler was
recently acquired by Groq, the leading AI inference company in
California. Oskar remains CEO of Maxeler, a Groq Company and now lives
on Palm Jumeirah in Dubai.
More details & future talks <https://spcl.inf.ethz.ch/Bcast/>
Scalable Parallel Computing Lab (SPCL)
Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich
Website <https://spcl.inf.ethz.ch> X(Twitter)
<https://twitter.com/spcl_eth> YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/@spcl>
GitHub <https://github.com/spcl>
1 week, 3 days