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

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.

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