Hugging Face and Graphcore partner for IPU-optimized Transformers

Summary

Hugging Face launched its Hardware Partner Program at the 2021 AI Hardware Summit to offer device-optimized models and software integrations. As a founding member of the program, Graphcore collaborated with Hugging Face to optimize Transformer models for its Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU). Graphcore IPUs use a massively parallel MIMD architecture with on-die ultra-high bandwidth memory designed for AI workloads featuring fine-grained parallelism, low precision arithmetic, and sparsity. Through Hugging Face's open-source Optimum toolkit, developers will receive plug-and-play access to certified, hardware-optimized models across vision, speech, translation, and text generation. Graphcore's Poplar SDK integrates with PyTorch, TensorFlow, Docker, and Kubernetes, simplifying the process of porting workloads to IPU-POD datacenter compute systems.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Graphcore IPUs use a massively parallel MIMD architecture with ultra-high bandwidth on-die memory, contrasting with traditional SIMD/SIMT GPU architectures.

2. 2

   Hugging Face introduced Optimum, an open-source library and toolkit providing developers with plug-and-play access to hardware-optimized models.

3. 3

   Graphcore's Poplar SDK integrates directly with standard frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow alongside orchestration tools like Docker and Kubernetes.