Artificial intelligence software company SenseTime (0020. HK) announced on January 24 that its Artificial Intelligence Computing Center (SenseTime AIDC), located in the Lingang New Area of the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, with a total investment of about 5.6 billion yuan, will be operational today.
With a construction area of 130,000 square meters and 5,000 cabinets in the first phase, SenseTime ISDC is an open, large-scale, low-carbon advanced computing infrastructure with a design peak computing power of more than 3,740 Petaflops per second (1 Petaflop equals 100 billion floating-point operations per second), making it one of the largest AI computing centers in Asia. AidC will be put into operation, which will make SenseTime's final strength exceed 4910 Petaflops per second, and it is currently connected to the new national (Shanghai) Internet Exchange center located in Lingang.
SenseTime AIDC supports research in the fields of super-large-scale cluster parallel training, trillion-level parameter large models, and protein folding research. It can also provide a large-scale application environment for domestic chips, and it is expected that by 2024, when all servers are in place, the proportion of AIDC's localization hardware will exceed 50%.
In the future, SenseTime plans to further expand the computing power of AIDC and continue to improve the power of AIDC cloud services. Yang Fan, co-founder and vice president of SenseTime, told the surging news (www.thepaper.cn) that the second phase of the project is being planned, and the scale of the second phase of the planned construction is 1-2 times the volume of the first phase of the project. "Such a scale design is designed according to the speed and rhythm of our industrial needs for the entire industry, including the region."
Support the training of general large models of trillion parameters and promote the ecological innovation of domestic intelligent chips
AIDC officially started construction in July 2020 and is an important part and physical bearer of the computing infrastructure layer in SenseCore's AI appliance. After AIDC is put into operation, it will build an innovative foundation for SenseTime's AI large-scale devices with multiple advantages such as ultra-large-scale flexible computing power, low computing cost, high security, and low network latency, and drive AI production capacity upgrades with higher efficiency and lower cost.
AIDC's computing and processing power can be called "Big Mac", with a peak computing power of 3740 Petaflops, which can provide large-scale elastic computing power and complete training of 1,000 billion parameter models. Based on this super-large model, more than 20,000 commercial models can be derived, helping the industry to quickly verify multiple new scenarios at a very low downstream data acquisition cost.
AIDC as a whole is mainly based on training, and its demand for massive computing power chips can also provide a large-scale application environment for domestic chips, pull the development of domestic chips from the demand side, and form more cost-competitive AI computing power services. It is expected that by 2024, when all servers are in place, the proportion of AIDC's localization hardware will exceed 50%.
"The biggest problem in the FIELD of AI is still the core AI computing chip, whether it is GPU or TPU, if it is a dominant state in terms of market usage." Yang Fan said that at the same time, GPUs as dedicated chips, the development cost of software stacks is very high.
"One of the important things that SenseTime can do is to help reduce this cost, first of all, we have a large number of software personnel, and our software personnel have a lot of experience in hardware optimization and algorithm optimization."
AIDC will accelerate the adaptation and integration of domestic smart chips through the "Artificial Intelligence Computing Power Industry Ecological Alliance" led by SenseTime, and bring supporting support from the scene demand to the whole chain of software value ecology, build systematic support for the innovation of domestic smart chips, and accelerate the formation of an artificial intelligence domestic computing power ecological foundation. "After the adaptation is completed, I will naturally be willing to purchase, if the domestic chip is getting better and better, the shipment volume is getting larger and larger, its cost will naturally decrease."
"In the past two years, we have carried out a lot of cooperation with many domestic manufacturers of domestic artificial intelligence chips, and we hope that the domestic cloud-side artificial intelligence processing chips and servers with it as the core can be used on a larger scale and a wider range of the market as soon as possible." Yang Fan said.
In addition, AIDC can ensure complete physical isolation through independent physical computer rooms, and with the help of privacy and secure computing technology, it can provide different customers with different levels of resource isolation from computing, storage to network.
AIDC is located in Shanghai Lingang New Area, for Shanghai and the Yangtze River Delta business distance is close, with fast access, low latency and other advantages, has been connected to the national (Shanghai) new Internet exchange center. As one of the core operating entities and initiators of the center, SenseTime will provide low-cost, high-quality network services and AI computing power services to the industry through AIDDC.
By directly connecting to the new Internet exchange center, AIDC can not only provide nearby access services and solve problems such as cross-network access, but also improve the efficiency of information exchange between enterprises, reduce transmission costs, improve transmission quality and stability, and achieve rapid interconnection between multi-point and multi-user networks.
Support research such as protein folding and accelerate the digital transformation of the whole industry
"I myself am a programmer-turned-software company leader, and the first time I did a civil engineering project, I was really emotional." Yang Fan said that it took only 168 days from the start of construction to the capping of the main structure of AIDC, which set a new record for the construction of Lingang.
After being put into operation, AIDC will further improve the model production efficiency of SenseCore's SENSE SenseTime AI device, support the innovation of SenseTime's four major software platforms of smart business, smart city, smart life and smart car, and carry out research work in the fields of ultra-large-scale cluster parallel training, trillion-level parameter model, protein folding research and other fields.
SenseTime will also open the technical capabilities of SenseTime's AI devices through AIDDC to provide AIaaS cloud services for industry, scientific research and government affairs, comprehensively improve AI productivity, and accelerate the digital transformation of the entire industry.
For the industry, AIDC will go deep into business scenarios such as Shanghai and the Yangtze River Delta region, activate the digital transformation of traditional heavy industry and manufacturing industry based on traditional industrial resources, and help accelerate the optimization and upgrading of the economic structure.
"We did a cooperation in the industrial field last year, which is actually to use the basic capabilities of AIDC to promote the automation and intelligence of production lines in the steel industry and improve efficiency." We did a weld inspection to see if the welds of the steel met the standard, and we did things like this with AIDC-backed algorithms. Yang Fan said.
For scientific research, AIDC relies on massive computing power resources, cluster scheduling advantages, and a complete AI algorithm tool chain to support and serve the major national scientific and technological infrastructure and scientific research and innovation entities in Shanghai and the Yangtze River Delta region.
At present, SenseTime AIDC has reached cooperation intentions with universities and scientific research institutions such as the National Protein Science Center (Shanghai) to make full use of artificial intelligence technology to drive traditional scientific research into a new development model.
"The National Center for Protein Science (Shanghai) actually hopes to use AIDC to help him with his major basic research in the biological sciences, and hopes to use our AI computing power and AI scientists to work with their biological scientists to make more breakthroughs in their scientific research fields."
For government affairs, SenseTime will empower city managers through AIDC and SenseTime's Ark City Open Platform, support the construction of the "one network unified management" system, and accelerate the process of intelligent urban governance. AIDC will help city managers transform data into operational insights, incident alerts and management actions to achieve AI governance in terms of public facility status, community property management, cityscape management, flood conditions, and hazardous chemical leakage detection.
As of June 30, 2021, SenseTime has established 23 AI supercomputing clusters in key regional markets. In the future, SenseTime plans to further expand the computing power of AIDC and continue to improve the power of AIDC cloud services.
"AIDC is essentially to serve the industrial upgrading and transformation and smart city development in the local area, and essentially provides AI services, so the construction of AIDC will definitely go to those places where there are core industries and where there are transformation and upgrading requirements in core industries."
Yang Fan said that today's artificial intelligence industry upgrade is a cost, "large manufacturers may be able to pay a certain cost, if the local are some single scale is very small, for example, paper mills, how much money does this manufacturer have to do intelligent transformation of the factory?" It may not even do informatization. "Therefore, the first step in choosing to build a smart computing center in one place is to measure how big the demand for industrial upgrading in the next three years is, and then look at how large-scale intelligent computing center should be built."