Technology - Google News

Nvidia’s first Ampere GPU is designed for data centers and AI, not your PC - The Verge
[Update: Note 9 too] Samsung Galaxy S10 series now receiving the May 2020 security patch - 9to5Google
How Effective Are Contact Tracing Apps? - Slate Magazine

Nvidia’s first Ampere GPU is designed for data centers and AI, not your PC - The Verge

Posted: 14 May 2020 06:15 AM PDT

Nvidia is unveiling its next-generation Ampere GPU architecture today. The first GPU to use Ampere will be Nvidia's new A100, built for scientific computing, cloud graphics, and data analytics. While there have been plenty of rumors around Nvidia's Ampere plans for GeForce "RTX 3080" cards, the A100 will primarily be used in data centers.

Nvidia's latest data center push comes amid a pandemic and a huge increase in demand for cloud computing. Describing the coronavirus situation as "terribly tragic," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang noted that "cloud usage of services are going to see a surge," in a press briefing attended by The Verge. "Those dynamics are really quite good for our data center business ... My expectation is that Ampere is going to do remarkably well. It's our best data center GPU ever made and it capitalizes on nearly a decade of our data center experience."

The A100 sports more than 54 billion transistors, making it the world's largest 7nm processor. "That is basically at nearly the theoretical limits of what's possible in semiconductor manufacturing today," explains Huang. "The largest die the world's ever made, and the largest number of transistors in a compute engine the world's ever made."

Nvidia is boosting its Tensor cores to make them easier to use for developers, and the A100 will also include 19.5 teraflops of FP32 performance, 6,912 CUDA cores, 40GB of memory, and 1.6TB/s of memory bandwidth. All of this performance isn't going into powering the latest version of Assassin's Creed, though.

Instead, Nvidia is combining these GPUs into a stacked AI system that will power its supercomputers in data centers around the world. Much like how Nvidia used its previous Volta architecture to create the Tesla V100 and DGX systems, a new DGX A100 AI system combines eight of these A100 GPUs into a single giant GPU.

The DGX A100 system promises 5 petaflops of performance, thanks to these eight A100s, and they're being combined using Nvidia's third-generation version of NVLink. Combining these eight GPUs means there's 320GB of GPU memory with 12.4TB/s of memory bandwidth. Nvidia is also including 15TB of Gen4 NVMe internal storage to power AI training tasks. Researchers and scientists using the DGX A100 systems will even be able to split workloads into up to 56 instances, spreading smaller tasks across the powerful GPUs.

Nvidia's recent $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox, a server networking supplier, is also coming into play, as the DGX A100 includes nine 200Gb/s network interfaces for a total of 3.6Tb/s per second of bidirectional bandwidth. As modern data centers adapt to increasingly diverse workloads, Mellanox's technology will prove ever more important for Nvidia. Huang describes Mellanox as the all-important "connecting tissue" in the next generation of data centers.

"If you take a look at the way modern data centers are architected, the workloads they have to do are more diverse than ever," explains Huang. "Our approach going forward is not to just focus on the server itself but to think about the entire data center as a computing unit. Going forward I believe the world is going to think about data centers as a computing unit and we're going to be thinking about data center-scale computing. No longer just personal computers or servers, but we're going to be operating on the data center scale."

Nvidia's DGX A100 systems have already begun shipping, with some of the first applications including research into COVID-19 conducted at the US Argonne National Laboratory.

"We're using America's most powerful supercomputers in the fight against COVID-19, running AI models and simulations on the latest technology available, like the NVIDIA DGX A100," says Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences at Argonne. "The compute power of the new DGX A100 systems coming to Argonne will help researchers explore treatments and vaccines and study the spread of the virus, enabling scientists to do years' worth of AI-accelerated work in months or days."

Nvidia says that Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Dell, Alibaba, and many other big cloud service providers are also planning to incorporate the single A100 GPUs into their own offerings. "The adoption and the enthusiasm for Ampere from all of the hyperscalers and computer makers around the world is really unprecedented," says Huang. "This is the fastest launch of a new data center architecture we've ever had, and it's understandable."

Much like the larger DGX A100 cluster system, Nvidia also allows each individual A100 GPU to be partitioned into up to seven independent instances for smaller compute tasks. These systems won't come cheap, though. Nvidia's DGX A100 comes with big performance promises, but systems start at $199,000 for a combination of eight of these A100 chips.

It's not clear how Nvidia will now progress Ampere directly into consumer-grade GPUs just yet. Nvidia introduced its Volta architecture, with dedicated artificial intelligence processors (tensor cores) in much the same way as today's Ampere unveiling. But Volta didn't go on to power Nvidia's line of GeForce consumer products. Instead, Nvidia launched a Volta-powered $2,999 Titan V (which it called "the most powerful PC GPU ever created") focused on AI and scientific simulation processing, not gaming or creative tasks.

Despite rumors of Volta powering future GeForce cards, Nvidia instead introduced its Turing architecture in 2018, which combined its dedicated tensor cores with new ray-tracing capabilities. Turing went on to power cards like the RTX 2080 instead of Volta, just weeks after Huang said the next line of graphics cards wouldn't be launching for "a long time." Nvidia even stripped out the RT and Tensor cores for Turing-powered cards like the GTX 1660 Ti.

New "RTX 3080" cards could be just months away then, but we still don't know for sure if they'll be using this new Ampere architecture. "There's great overlap in the architecture, that's without a doubt," hinted Huang. "The configuration, the sizing of the different elements of the chip is very different."

Nvidia uses HBM memory for its data center GPUs, and that's not something the company uses for consumer PC gaming GPUs. The data center GPUs are also focused much more heavily on AI tasks and compute, than graphics. "We'll be much more heavily biased towards graphics and less towards double-precision floating point," adds Huang.

Speculation around Nvidia's Ampere plans has intensified recently, and with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X set to launch with AMD-powered GPU solutions later this year, Nvidia will surely need to have something new to offer PC gamers later this year.

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[Update: Note 9 too] Samsung Galaxy S10 series now receiving the May 2020 security patch - 9to5Google

Posted: 14 May 2020 03:22 AM PDT

In keeping with their recent update promptness, Samsung is now pushing the May 2020 security patch for 2019's flagship Galaxy S10 series.

With the May 2020 security patch also rolling out for the Google Pixel series, it's credit to Samsung for ensuring that they are patching security holes alongside Google. Although on the other hand, given that OEMs are aware of the issues long in advance, so as to prepare their own OS updates, maybe we should be more adamant that other firms follow Samsung's recent example.

[Update 05/14]: The Galaxy Note 9 has joined the party by gaining the May 2020 security patch. Firmware version N960FXXS5DTE2 has now begun rolling out across Europe, with reports (via SamMobile) suggesting that owners in Germany are, again, first in line to get the patch on their former flagship. However, like the S9 patch, this update doesn't bring any of the awaited One UI 2.1 features.

[Update 05/13]: As per SamMobile, the May patch should now be rolling out globally for the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+. It's a little later than the rollout for the S10 series, but it's still in good time for those worried about when they'll get an OTA update notification.

Firmware version G96xFXXS9DTD7 has been spotted heading out to Galaxy S9 devices across most of Asia and has now started to trickle into Western Europe — with Germany first in line. We'll likely see the patch head out further over the coming weeks. That said, now might be the time to go and check your Settings > System updates panel to see if you can update.

Currently rolling out right now, Samsung has pushed firmware versions G970FXXS5CTD1 for the Galaxy S10e, G973FXXS5CTD1 for the Galaxy S10, and G975FXXS5CTD1 for the Galaxy S10+ respectively. For those with the top tier Galaxy S10 5G, you're not left out, as the G977BXXS4CTD1 firmware is also heading out (via SamMobile).

The May 2020 patch is currently rolling out for those with the Galaxy S10 series in Europe. We do expect the rollout to expand globally over the coming days. Unlike previous updates though, there are no notable new features or software tweaks to speak of.

To check if you have the OTA update available, be sure to head to your Settings > System Updates panel and refresh the pane regularly. Alternatively, if you have seen the May 2020 patch available on your Galaxy S10 series device, be sure to let us know down in the comments section below what device you have and where you are based.

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How Effective Are Contact Tracing Apps? - Slate Magazine

Posted: 13 May 2020 03:17 PM PDT

An iPhone with the words "COVID TRACKER" is held in a hand, with red stylized waves coming off the phone. — A "COVID TRACKER" logo is pictured in a call center dedicated to contact tracing in Brussels on Friday.

Laurie Dieffembacq/Getty Images

This article is part of Privacy in the Pandemic, a Future Tense series.

At the heart of recent debates on automated contact tracing in the U.S. and Europe has been the issue of privacy. The underlying assumption of these discussions is that contact tracing apps can serve as a kind of panacea—a way for societies to reopen with minor inconvenience—if only we can strike the right balance on privacy.

But we still don't really know how effective contact tracing apps actually are—particularly in societies that don't already have a vast surveillance infrastructure. The case of Iceland in particular, as the MIT Technology Review reported Monday, suggests we shouldn't put too much hope on a digital solution: Although Iceland's app has the highest penetration rate of all contact trackers in the world, it doesn't appear to have helped much in addressing COVID-19.

Iceland launched a government-backed tracing app, Rakning C-19, in early April, a little more than a month after the country confirmed its first case of COVID-19. Before the app was developed, the government had already formed a team of contact tracers to interview COVID-19 patients and track down the individuals they'd recently encountered. The app, which is voluntary and relies on permission to release data, analyzes users' GPS data to map where they've been in order to assist Iceland's Contact Tracing Team. Location data is saved locally on users' phones, and if the Contact Tracing Team needs your assistance, it has to send a request for the information. If users agree, their data is stored for 14 days in the Tracing Team's database.

On paper, Rakning appears to be a great success. The app launched relatively early, and according to the Technology Review's COVID Tracing Tracker project, it has the highest download rate of any contract tracer in the world, with 38 percent of the country's population of 364,000 using it. (People have likely been more incentivized to download it, as well, since the app is unusually clear about how it stores data.) Iceland, meanwhile, has flattened the curve while avoiding large-scale lockdowns.

However, Gestur Pálmason, a detective inspector with the Icelandic Police Service who is overseeing contact tracing efforts, says that the impact has been small, especially compared with methods of manual contact tracing, such as phone calls. "The technology is more or less … I wouldn't say useless," Pálmason told the Technology Review. "But it's the integration of the two that gives you results. I would say [Rakning] has proven useful in a few cases, but it wasn't a game changer for us." He explained that although Rakning has at times been useful, the desire to find easy technological solutions has led people to overstate the utility of such apps.

Iceland's success in managing COVID-19 might instead be attributed to other factors, including the country's early testing of high-risk individuals before it even confirmed its first case, wide-scale testing in the months since, that robust manual contact tracing system, and geographic isolation. This does not bode particularly well for countries—especially ones without those advantages—that have staked some of their reopening policies on automated contact tracing in the coming weeks and months. The British government, for instance, is counting on its app, which is currently being trialed on the Isle of Wight, to help ease restrictions.

Jason Bay, the product lead of TraceTogether, Singapore's (voluntary) contact tracing app, has also warned against seeing automated contact tracing as a cure-all. In an April blog post, he wrote, "If you ask me whether any Bluetooth contact tracing system deployed or under development, anywhere in the world, is ready to replace manual contact tracing, I will say without qualification that the answer is, No." There is simply too much critical information (like whether someone was in a place with adequate ventilation or even whether they were singing with a group) that an automated system can't access, Bay argued. He emphasized that tracing should remain a human-fronted process, writing, "You cannot 'big data' your way out of a 'no data' situation. Period."

China's automated tracing system might be a more successful model, but as the Technology Review's COVID Tracing Tracker notes, participation is involuntary, and there's considerable lack of transparency—it's still unclear how China's technology works—which isn't something Western countries could emulate. It's also worth noting that China's technology (and to a lesser extent, that of other East and Southeast Asian countries) supplements an extensive preexisting surveillance network.

Ultimately, the situation Pálmason described in Iceland aligns in part with an article the Brookings Institution's TechStream published in April, which cautioned against the "fragile digital solution" of automated tracing creating a false sense of security. That article's authors argued that contact tracing technology often doesn't account for barriers as basic as walls, or personal protections such as masks, and thus would flag individuals unlikely to have been infected (or transmit the disease to others). The authors also predicted that the technology would eventually lead users to disregard warnings, after being flagged multiple times (like when your office fire alarm goes off constantly), and that it might negatively impact marginalized communities where people live in closer proximity to one another.

That's why the authors of the TechStream article "urge developers of contact-tracing apps, as well the companies enabling their development, to be candid about the limitations and implications of the technology." Your smartphone can help keep you safe—but it can't do it alone.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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