Government tech shouldnt be the minor leagues – Protocol

Hello and welcome to Protocol Enterprise! Today: why this years Turing Award winner is worried about the future of government tech efforts, Nvidia takes a closer look at the health care market, and the debut of Pixel Pat.

Intel is still the leader in chips for cloud infrastructure by a large margin, but AMD continues to gain ground in this lucrative market. According to a research note from Jefferies, AMDs chips made up 72% of all new cloud instances in February and overall, it now enjoys 14.8% of the cloud market to Intels 78.6%.

Turing Award winner Jack Dongarras new Nobel Prize of computing trophy for his supercomputing work comes with a cool $1 million courtesy of Google. But Dongarra would rather the company and its Big Tech brethren quit drafting talent from his lab system.

In fact, he said he is tired of the government labs acting as a proverbial farm team for Big Tech.

Dongarra is a professor at University of Tennessee and a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, both places where big tech companies have looked for science and tech talent.

In general, its been tough for government agencies and labs to compete for talent against bigger private-sector salaries and benefits like gourmet lunches and kombucha kegs (and dont forget those enticing stock options).

Despite close collaborations, sometimes tensions among private-sector researchers and those from academia and government labs rise to the surface. Case in point: the quantum dustup between the White House and Google.

Ultimately, Dongarra said, government labs and scientific research could falter if things continue this way.

Kate Kaye (email | twitter)

Seeking to triple its employee base, Whisk, a fully remote team, sought diverse talent from a wide variety of regions through Upwork, a work marketplace that connects businesses with independent professionals and agencies around the globe.

Learn more

For most of its early life, tech industry insiders thought of Nvidia largely in terms of its largest business: video game chips. But the company in recent years has sought to defy that impression, expanding its software effort and making big bets on the data center.

One of the lesser-known markets Nvidia has pursued in recent years is medical care, which is a $10 trillion industry, according to Nvidia Health Care Vice President Kimberly Powell. Powell recently spoke with Protocol about the companys efforts for an upcoming interview:

We can make a significant contribution in the area of medical imaging and medical devices. One of the largest workloads in supercomputing, and accelerated computing, is in the area of life sciences. To be able to do simulation of diseases, and chemical compounds interacting and trying to stop the behavior [its] to do drug discovery, essentially in silicon, in a computer.

Our charter is to say how do we take these modern computing approaches of accelerated computing, artificial intelligence, computer graphics, and help the health care industry benefit from it.

Max A. Cherney (email | twitter)

Its been a little over a year since Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, arguably one of the most significant employees in Intels 53-year history, returned to the company. To celebrate the occasion, Intel released a cute 8-bit video game called Pixel Pat, where you assume control of Intels chief geek and try to navigate through a chip fab filled with prizes (chip wafers) and obstacles (these blob-like things that look kinda like the ghosts in Pac-Man).

Along the way, you learn fun facts about Intels history, although somebody forgot to include its legal disputes with AMD and the federal government. Its a little challenging at first, and its habit of having you respawn directly over a huge chasm was kind of annoying, but give it a whirl this weekend.

Whisk isnt alone in unlocking the global marketplace to find the right types of employees to support its business goals. More than three-quarters of U.S. companies have used remote freelancers, according to research from Upwork, and more than a quarter of businesses plan to go fully remote in the next five years.

Learn more

Thanks for reading see you Monday!

Read the original here:

Government tech shouldnt be the minor leagues - Protocol