TechTouch Asia

- The world's first Open Accelerator Infrastructure (OAI)-compliant and liquid cooling rack-scale AI computing product, X-MAN 4.0, is jointly launched by Baidu and Inspur - Inspur launches the first 21” reference system supporting the OAI Universal BaseBoard (UBB) specification Inspur , a data centre and artificial intelligence (AI) full-stack solutions provider, has announced two AI-driven open computing systems. The X-MAN 4.0, developed with Baidu, is the world’s first OAI-compliant and liquid-cooled rack-scale AI computing product optimised for deep neural network applications, the OCP Platinum Member and OCP Solution Provider said. Source: Inspur. The X-MAN 4.0. The hardware needed to run AI is becoming more complex, Inspur says, with AI accelerator integration typically taking six to 12 months. The OAI specification—led by Baidu, Facebook and Microsoft in the Open Compute Project (OCP) community—centralises the technical specifications of the accelera...

Workiva , the cloud provider of connected reporting and compliance solutions, and accounting automation software player  BlackLine   have announced that their platforms are now integrated. The integration will enable users to seamlessly connect and transfer data between the two platforms, improving accuracy and transparency in the record-to-report process. “Many of our customers use BlackLine to automate balance sheet reconciliations and other processes they need for a successful financial close before they use the Workiva platform for reporting and compliance,” said Mike Rost, VP of Partners and Alliances at Workiva. “With this new integration, our joint customers will be able to benefit from better transparency across applications and a higher level of trust and confidence in the data they report.” Both providers were named Leaders in Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Close Solutions.* “Thousands of leading finance and accounting teams around the...

- The outlook on renewables as a source of data centre power has shifted - Rack density has increased, but not as much as expected - Edge computing grows in importance - Talent management has to evolve Vertiv has identified an increasing focus on edge computing for data centres as we move towards 2025. Data centre operators and owners in Singapore and Asia Pacific are highly optimistic about the future of edge computing, a new survey from Vertiv has revealed. In Data Centre 2025: Closer to the Edge, a global, industrywide survey* conducted by Vertiv , 57% of respondents from Singapore expect IT resource utilisation at the edge to reach at least 60% by 2025. This reflects a global sentiment on the increasing prevalence of edge computing in the data centre landscape, which is fuelled by more process-intensive applications such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, the Internet of things and 5G technology. Globally, 55% of respondents expect IT resourc...