Product-market fit is a marvellous thing! Aussie ingenuity, investment, skills and a little help from Innate Innovation to cast and ratify truly global & sustainability-based technology play! #gotomarket #strategy Our client Firmus and ST Telemedia Global Data Centres have just announced a massive join-venture to roll out their ultra-sustainable AI computing platform - the HyperCube, across STT's global sites. Firmus is pioneering the combination of #modularDCs, #immersion and NVIDIA #DGX / #OVX at scale. The result - Sustainable Metal Cloud, is the quickest and cleanest way to source #generativeAI scale of #GPU #cloud resources! #sustainability #decarbonisation #decarbonization #hpc

Our Emily giving a bit of time giving to Very Special Kids 24-hour Treadmill Challenge (team: the young & the restless) last Friday

This article is an excellent introduction to scope 1, scope 2 & scope 3 for #cloud computing by Adrian Cockcroft. Meaningful measurement of your own, your project's and your whole organisation's #carbonemissions is challenging. A focus of Innate Innovation is to help organisations understand their footprint at both cultural and technological levels. We are keen to hear from organisations big and small in any field. Do you feel adequately aware of how to measure? How to develop an internal social licence for computing's #sustainability? How to win at an #energytransition over time?

Released last week, listen to our founder Steve Quenette speaking about all things #innateinnovation - the confluence of #decarbonisation, #innovationculture, #AI, #LLM #quantumcomputing and #cybersecurity. Episode #47 now LIVE! Steve is known in tech circles as a prominent #cloudbuilder and we go deep in discussing the 'Microcosm of Future Digital Societies'

Who is responsible for bad code in free software? Is it about to change? The Python Software Foundation has expressed "concern that proposed #EU #cybersecurity laws will leave #opensource organisations and individuals unfairly liable for distributing incorrect code". Let's put the legal journey aside for a moment. Python Software Foundation's concerns illuminate a conundrum in every innovative organisation. #Innovation and #cybersecurity are diametrically opposite without purposeful consideration. We need both, but without getting in each other's way. We'll have to see how amendments and legal interpretation play out. However, we all want underlying open-source software to exhibit best practices in governance, which these foundations embody. Foundations require funding to exist, which means it's natural for them to sell something (e.g. as indirect as t-shirts and as direct as training & certification, but they don't sell the software itself). Under the EU's proposed "Cyber Resilience Act" and "Product Liability Act", such foundations could be interpreted as software companies. Under such an interpretation, the foundation and possibly the individual contributor are as liable as an entity making commercial gains from software. Yet that contributor made no financial gain from their contribution. Let's assume it plays out this way. Then the long-term result would be the loss of the global innovations bought about by open source (which underpins nearly everything digital today). Another possible solution is to provide an exception for such software and foundations. The concern then becomes we also need to ensure companies that deploy open-source software are appropriately liable. It's easy to see exploitations of such exceptions unfairly affecting contributors or consumers. We'll have to watch this space.

Apple has delayed approval of an email-app update with AI-powered language tools (#ChatGPT), concerned with insufficient measures to prevent the AI from generating content inappropriate for children. The app can raise the age restriction to 17 and older or include content filtering. From a #technologygovernance perspective, and we're simplifying here - Apple is not taking responsibility for the AI generating inappropriate content for that application class. In the example case, OpenAI (presently) does not own the risk for everyone. Hence the onus is on the app provider to mitigate the #risk of inappropriate content for children. The options are to run your own generative #AI / large language model (#LLM) / ~ChatGPT~ (something that is becoming easier) or employ another robot to watch over the generated content (that is, outsource the risk, not that there's a rich market of such providers yet). Calculating a path for success today and tomorrow is non-trivial.

Technical challenges & technology markets have always shaped #HPC. Once the investment in HPC, typically to address a #grandchallenge and funded by governments, created the technologies all other areas of computing used. The community has a long history of leading the show. However, recent investment in #clouds, #smartphones, consumable #AI, etc., far surpasses any investment into grand challenges. Consequently, the cost and place of engineering large and novel systems, including HPC, has genuinely shifted away from governments. Daniel Reed, Dennis Gannon and Jack Dongarra provide a roadmap for a continued leadership role. They are asking the HPC community to continue to partner and #codesign with the research community and the chip & HPC vendors. They are asking the community to also partner and codesign with the innovative private sector (including cloud, smartphone, AI, etc. companies). Additionally, they are asking the community to partner internationally, just like other major scientific equipment. We wholeheartedly agree and look forward to the thought leadership required to re-think partnerships and research's role in technology.

Monash University's Smart Energy City project was a living laboratory for innovative digital technology experiments, including advanced grid stability management, optimised virtual power plants, and the democratised prosumer in society (e.g. peer-to-peer energy trading transactions). Its climate change ambition challenges traditional organisational boundaries and operational roles. Check out their page. For example, optimal decarbonisation of a campus requires a transition from capturing data for today's operations to warehousing all energy-related technology data from buildings, suppliers and devices. And doing so, de-risking the cost of future decarbonisation innovation. As an early customer, they engaged prior to establishing the Innate Innovation brand, trading as consultants through Monash University. Our advice led to literacy uplift, incentivising organisation-wide collaboration and establishing a culture for data governance. Our advice also led to quantifiable measures for data protection & value throughout the experiments, enabling investment and decision-making.

Until recently, the CPU conducted most of the work done by a computer. Increasingly, specialised chips perform targeted tasks safer, cheaper and faster. Nvidia, a technology provider, wanted to know the role Data Processing Units (DPUs) play in cybersecurity risk mitigation when applied to customers who collaborate widely and are compute-intensive (e.g. they utilise AI at scale). As an early customer, they engaged prior to establishing the Innate Innovation brand, trading as consultants through Monash University. Our role was to facilitate strategic deployment of scarce pre-general-availability equipment to test key selling points and explore the market. See the Nvidia press release. Innate Innovation discovered Nvidia's customers are heroes needing halos to provide ever-increasing levels of cybersecurity, data protection & other priorities of the social consciousness. However, these protections risk increasing workforce effort or overly consuming the customer's compute-intensive resources. Hence customers face an increasing complexity of increasing protections whilst also maintaining workforce productivity, satisfaction, and, thus, workforce retention. DPUs offer a technical basis to mitigate all these risks. However, the challenge becomes acquiring the experience, intuition and leadership to holistically implement this novel technology for business needs (systems integration of the highly innovative). To test this data governance narrative, we facilitated and oversaw the safe experimentation of DPUs in real-world settings using early ports of well-known cybersecurity tools and bespoke data protections coded using Nvidia's APIs. Arik Rostal, Global head of Business Development Cybersecurity, NVIDIA "Forward thinking and innovative. Steve Quenette (founder and principal) is constantly researching and exploring ways to leverage leading technologies to tackle today’s business challenges. He was one of the first to understand and apply our revolutionary DPU technology to perform cybersecurity on advanced applications."

The Monash eResearch Centre (MeRC) is a managed service provider and broker for compute-intensive workloads (e.g. AI, simulation and analysis) & hosting of enduring data. However, it is in perpetual need of modernisation, responding to research-driven technologies and corporate risk mitigation. It also relies on a niche and talented workforce in constant demand. Check out their page. As an early customer, they engaged prior to establishing the Innate Innovation brand, trading as consultants through Monash University. Modernising MeRC's go-to-market was a complex journey of identifying and resolving cultural tensions. Innate Innovation's go-to-market strategies led to a systemic uplift in data governance (known ownership, retention, disposal and sensitivity) for hundreds of grant-winning researchers. Our strategy helped the workforce safely deliver digital capabilities to collaborators at scale. It supported customers scaling to compute-intensive resources (HPC and clouds). It introduced FinOps leading to transparency and accountability of resource consumption. Collectively these strategies enable higher-value Innovation, cybersecurity, data protection, technology sovereignty and cost efficiencies. However, a priority was also to improve workforce sentiment and, thus, talent attraction & retention. In return, the centre's customers are early adopters of compute-intensive methods (such as AI) and data protection through safe havens. Professor Paul Bonnington, former Director Monash eResearch "The strategic advice, executive leadership and purposeful cultural alignment of staff and researchers meant we could adapt our offerings to address the growing concerns of society, whilst also growing staff and customer satisfaction"