Viridian Reclaimed Wood introduces a new line of engineered reclaimed hardwood flooring in four different species, according to Viridian co-owner Joe Mitchoff.

Businesses are cutting back on hours to avoid having to provide health care coverage under the new Affordable Care Act.

Steve Julian: Business analyst Mark Lacter, who's affected here?

Mark Lacter: Thirty hours a week is the magic number for workers to be considered full time under the new law.  If a business has 50 or more full-time employees, health care coverage has to be provided.  Except that a lot business owners say that the additional cost is going to be a financial killer, so instead, some of them have been cutting back hours to below that 30-hour threshold.  More than 200,000 Californians are at risk of losing hours from the health care law - that according to one study.

Julian: What kinds of businesses are doing this?

Lacter: Restaurant chains have received much of the attention, but the city of Long Beach, as an example, is going to reduce hours for a couple of hundred of its workers.  And, last week came word that the L.A.-based clothing chain Forever 21 will cut some of its full-time employees to a maximum 29-and-a-half hours a week, and classify them as part time.  That touched off an outcry on the Internet - people were saying that Forever 21 was being unfair and greedy - though the company says that only a small number of employees are affected, and that its decision has nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act.  There's really no way to know - Forever 21 is a private company, which means it's not obligated to disclose a whole lot.  What we do know is that those people will be losing their health care coverage.

Julian: And, the ultimate impact on businesses and workers?

Lacter: Steve, you're looking at several years before the picture becomes clear.  Here in California, workers not eligible for health care through their employer can get their own individual coverage, and if their income levels are not over a certain amount, they'd be eligible for Medicaid.  And, let's not forget many businesses already provide coverage for their employees.  So, lots of rhetoric - but, not many conclusions to draw from, which does make you wonder why so many business owners are unwilling to at least give this thing a chance.  Just doesn't seem to be much generosity of spirit for their workers, not to mention any recognition that if people can go to a doctor instead of an emergency room we'd probably all be better off.

Julian: Health care is far from the only controversy for Forever 21, true?

Lacter: In some ways, it's one of the biggest Southern California success stories.  Don Chang emigrated here in 1981 from Korea at the age of 18, opened his first store in Highland Park three years later (it was called Fashion 21), and he never looked back.  Today, revenues are approaching $4 billion.  But, the guy must have some pretty hefty legal bills because his company has been accused of all kinds of workplace violations.  The lawsuits alleged that workers preparing items for the Forever 21 stores didn't receive overtime, that they didn't get required work breaks, that they received substandard wages, and that they worked in dirty and unsafe conditions - sweatshop conditions, essentially.

Julian: Are most of their claims settled out of court?  You don't hear much about them.

Lacter: They are, which means there's usually a minimal amount of media coverage.  If a privately held company decides to keep quiet by not releasing financial results or other operational information, there's not likely to be much of a story - unlike what happens with a company like Apple, which is always under scrutiny.  Sometimes, plaintiffs will try to organize class-action suits, but that's extremely tough when you're dealing with low-wage workers who are often very reluctant to get involved because of their legal status.  And, let's not forget that Forever 21 - like any low-cost retailer - is simply catering to the demand for cheap, stylish clothes that are made as quickly as possible.

Julian: I guess you can't make that happen when wages and benefits are appreciably higher than your competition.

Lacter: The next time you walk into a Forever 21 store and wonder how prices can be so reasonable, that's how.

Mark Lacter writes for Los Angeles Magazine and pens the business blog at LA Observed.com.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Meridian Rapid Defense Group protects the 2013 Grammy Awards against vehicular intrusion.

This trip solidified my conviction to learning photography. A lot has happened since this shot was taken.
Can you pinpoint the moment you decided to pursue photography? (at Toronto, Ontario)

TMI Climate Solutions, a manufacturer of advanced air handling, hydronic systems, and custom HVAC solutions, has announced a new subsidiary, TMI Climate Solutions Canada Inc. The company also announced completion of a new 200,000-square-foot manufacturing plant in Pointe-Claire (Montreal), Quebec.

The RM85 is the latest in Ebac’s line of rotational molded polyethylene housing dehumidifiers.

You remember yesterday, when we wrote about Micron's new 6550 ION SSD and how it wasn't exactly the biggest SSD we'd seen? Well, that was yesterday. Today, Solidigm is announcing a new model in the D5-P5336 SSD family with a whopping 122.88 terabytes of storage in a single drive, finally topping the Nimbus Exadrive. Micron still holds the

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Génova eleva el pulso a los dos primeros espadas del PPE: Weber contra la presidenta de la Comisión Leer

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El Congreso de los Diputados vive hoy en ese universo paralelo llamado Debate del Estado de la Nación. Un mundo de color de rosa o negro como el tizón, según el partido político que lo pinte. 

It feels a little Fear Factory-ish.

Nvidia, Oracle, Google, Dell and 13 other companies reported how long it takes their computers to train the key neural networks in use today. Among those results were the first glimpse of Nvidia’s next generation GPU, the B200, and Google’s upcoming accelerator, called Trillium. The B200 posted a…

In Pittsburgh, entire houses have been converted into individual art installations filled with unusual objects. A new house is now open.

"Giving up on Nvidia here after its hit — Hopper — is like giving up on Apple at iPhone 1 or 2," Melius Research said.

Nvidia, the AI-chip giant, petitioned the nation's highest court after a lower court permitted a 2018 class action lawsuit to move ahead.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in Nvidia’s bid to appeal a securities fraud lawsuit today, just days after… Continue reading US Supreme Court to hear bid by Nvidia to appeal securities fraud lawsuit

The post US Supreme Court to hear bid by Nvidia to appeal securities fraud lawsuit appeared first on ReadWrite.

Nov. 13, 2024 — Generative AI applications that use text, computer code, protein chains, summaries, video and even 3D graphics require data-center-scale accelerated computing to efficiently train the large language models […]

The post NVIDIA: Blackwell Delivers Next-Level MLPerf Training Performance appeared first on HPCwire.

TOKYO, Nov. 13, 2024 — NVIDIA has announced a series of collaborations with SoftBank Corp. designed to accelerate Japan’s sovereign AI initiatives and further its global technology leadership while also unlocking […]

The post NVIDIA Supports SoftBank in Building AI Supercomputer, Unveils AI-Driven Telecom Network appeared first on HPCwire.

Emira Property Fund's partnership with Poland-focused DL Invest Group includes redemption clauses that could yield it up to R4.2 billion in five years, more than 70% of Emira's current market value on the JSE.

Brait is looking to sell UK fashion retailer New Look between October 2025 and March 2026 with a Virgin Active sale or initial public offering (IPO) targeted a year later, after which the rest of its operations will be wound down.

India conveyed its stance of not travelling to Pakistan for the ICC Champions Trophy, citing security concerns.

[Leadership] The NNPC Gas Marketing Limited (NGML), a subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL), has successfully executed a Gas Sale and Purchase Agreement (GSPA) with Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals FZE.

Nvidia, Oracle, Google, Dell and 13 other companies reported how long it takes their computers to train the key neural networks in use today. Among those results were the first glimpse of Nvidia’s next generation GPU, the B200, and Google’s upcoming accelerator, called Trillium. The B200 posted a doubling of performance on some tests versus today’s workhorse Nvidia chip, the H100. And Trillium delivered nearly a four-fold boost over the chip Google tested in 2023.

The benchmark tests, called MLPerf v4.1, consist of six tasks: recommendation, the pre-training of the large language models (LLM) GPT-3 and BERT-large, the fine tuning of the Llama 2 70B large language model, object detection, graph node classification, and image generation.

Training GPT-3 is such a mammoth task that it’d be impractical to do the whole thing just to deliver a benchmark. Instead, the test is to train it to a point that experts have determined means it is likely to reach the goal if you kept going. For Llama 2 70B, the goal is not to train the LLM from scratch, but to take an already trained model and fine-tune it so it’s specialized in a particular expertise—in this case, government documents. Graph node classification is a type of machine learning used in fraud detection and drug discovery.

As what’s important in AI has evolved, mostly toward using generative AI, the set of tests has changed. This latest version of MLPerf marks a complete changeover in what’s being tested since the benchmark effort began. “At this point all of the original benchmarks have been phased out,” says David Kanter, who leads the benchmark effort at MLCommons. In the previous round it was taking mere seconds to perform some of the benchmarks.

Performance of the best machine learning systems on various benchmarks has outpaced what would be expected if gains were solely from Moore’s Law [blue line]. Solid line represent current benchmarks. Dashed lines represent benchmarks that have now been retired, because they are no longer industrially relevant.MLCommons

According to MLPerf’s calculations, AI training on the new suite of benchmarks is improving at about twice the rate one would expect from Moore’s Law. As the years have gone on, results have plateaued more quickly than they did at the start of MLPerf’s reign. Kanter attributes this mostly to the fact that companies have figured out how to do the benchmark tests on very large systems. Over time, Nvidia, Google, and others have developed software and network technology that allows for near linear scaling—doubling the processors cuts training time roughly in half.

First Nvidia Blackwell training results

This round marked the first training tests for Nvidia’s next GPU architecture, called Blackwell. For the GPT-3 training and LLM fine-tuning, the Blackwell (B200) roughly doubled the performance of the H100 on a per-GPU basis. The gains were a little less robust but still substantial for recommender systems and image generation—64 percent and 62 percent, respectively.

The Blackwell architecture, embodied in the Nvidia B200 GPU, continues an ongoing trend toward using less and less precise numbers to speed up AI. For certain parts of transformer neural networks such as ChatGPT, Llama2, and Stable Diffusion, the Nvidia H100 and H200 use 8-bit floating point numbers. The B200 brings that down to just 4 bits.

Google debuts 6th gen hardware

Google showed the first results for its 6^th generation of TPU, called Trillium—which it unveiled only last month—and a second round of results for its 5^th generation variant, the Cloud TPU v5p. In the 2023 edition, the search giant entered a different variant of the 5^th generation TPU, v5e, designed more for efficiency than performance. Versus the latter, Trillium delivers as much as a 3.8-fold performance boost on the GPT-3 training task.

But versus everyone’s arch-rival Nvidia, things weren’t as rosy. A system made up of 6,144 TPU v5ps reached the GPT-3 training checkpoint in 11.77 minutes, placing a distant second to an 11,616-Nvidia H100 system, which accomplished the task in about 3.44 minutes. That top TPU system was only about 25 seconds faster than an H100 computer half its size.

A Dell Technologies computer fine-tuned the Llama 2 70B large language model using about 75 cents worth of electricity.

In the closest head-to-head comparison between v5p and Trillium, with each system made up of 2048 TPUs, the upcoming Trillium shaved a solid 2 minutes off of the GPT-3 training time, nearly an 8 percent improvement on v5p’s 29.6 minutes. Another difference between the Trillium and v5p entries is that Trillium is paired with AMD Epyc CPUs instead of the v5p’s Intel Xeons.

Google also trained the image generator, Stable Diffusion, with the Cloud TPU v5p. At 2.6 billion parameters, Stable Diffusion is a light enough lift that MLPerf contestants are asked to train it to convergence instead of just to a checkpoint, as with GPT-3. A 1024 TPU system ranked second, finishing the job in 2 minutes 26 seconds, about a minute behind the same size system made up of Nvidia H100s.

Training power is still opaque

The steep energy cost of training neural networks has long been a source of concern. MLPerf is only beginning to measure this. Dell Technologies was the sole entrant in the energy category, with an eight-server system containing 64 Nvidia H100 GPUs and 16 Intel Xeon Platinum CPUs. The only measurement made was in the LLM fine-tuning task (Llama2 70B). The system consumed 16.4 megajoules during its 5-minute run, for an average power of 5.4 kilowatts. That means about 75 cents of electricity at the average cost in the United States.

While it doesn’t say much on its own, the result does potentially provide a ballpark for the power consumption of similar systems. Oracle, for example, reported a close performance result—4 minutes 45 seconds—using the same number and types of CPUs and GPUs.

Georgia coach Kirby Smart had lots of praise for backup safety Jake Pope on Tuesday, just days after he criticized the player for appearing to celebrate with fans from the opposing team.

Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce empathized with Dallas Cowboys star wide receiver CeeDee Lamb about fighting the sun glare at AT&T Stadium.

1. ‘Cricket at crossroads. Keep egos in check…’: Afridi attacks India without taking names for Champions Trophy row  Hindustan Times
2. Should Men In Blue play in Pakistan?  The Times of India
3. Champions Trophy 2025: ‘Not BCCI’s Issue, It Is…’ – Former PCB Chairman Najam Sethi Makes Controversial Claim  News24
4. "Countries Once Divided...": Shahid Afridi's Big Appeal To BCCI Amid Champions Trophy Row  NDTV Sports
5. ‘ICC should snatch hosting rights from India and Pakistan for 8 years’: Rashid Latif to HT on Champions Trophy muddle  Hindustan Times

A neighborhood watch group in a Christian Beirut neighborhood is on the lookout for militant operatives, which could make the area a target for Israeli airstrikes.

Google is running a test to see what happens when news results are removed for 1% of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, …

Pakistan's premier fast bowler Shaheen Afridi has reclaimed the No.1 position in the ICC Men's ODI Bowler Rankings, a spot he initially held during last year's Cricket World Cup in India.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday reaffirmed the Centre's commitment to providing better healthcare and improving the living conditions of the countrymen.