At the Huawei Connect 2019, the telecom giant announced its strategy for the computing market and released Atlas 900, the world’s fastest AI training cluster.
The new AI training cluster will focus on four things, as mentioned by Huawei’s Deputy Chairman- to push the boundaries of architecture, invest in processors for all scenarios, keep clear business boundaries, and build an open ecosystem.
Huawei took the decision based on estimation. Huawei is of the opinion that the next five years will bear witness to the rise of AI computing which is expected to rise for more than 80% of all computing power used around the world.
Hoping to further last year’s research and everything that their Da Vinci architecture stod for, Huawei will continue to invest in basic research.
Huawei’s next aim is to invest in processors, already Huawei is involved in the development of processors such as Kunpengfor general-purpose computing, Ascend processors for AI, Kirin processors for smart devices, and Honghu processors for smart screens.
However, Huawei would not go into the business of selling the processors. It will offer the processors as cloud services instead. Huawei is ready to invest another US$1.5 billion in the developer program to expand the program to support 5 million developers.
Atlas 900 is the most powerful processor till date and it owes its power completely to thousands of Ascend processors. It takes Atlas 900 only 59.8 seconds to train ResNet-50, the gold standard for measuring AI training performance.
This is a new age of exploration. An ocean of boundless potential is waiting, but just one ship won’t cut it. Today we launch a thousand ships. Let’s work together, seize this historic opportunity, and advance intelligence to new heights – Ken Hu, Deputy Chairman, Huawei
As Huawei will help in various fields with their new processor, ranging from astronomy to autonomous driving, various organizations are ready to lend a helping hand to Huawei to help them extend their research. Peng Cheng Lab will also work closely with Huawei to build China’s first evolving AI supercomputing system that supports exascale computing.
