SenseTime’s Massive AI Data Center Commences Operation
- By DSAITrends editors
- February 08, 2022
AI software firm SenseTime has announced that its next-generation Artificial Intelligence Data Center (AIDC) in China has commenced operation.
Located in the Lingang New Area of Shanghai, the AIDC has a designed computing capacity of 3.74 exaFLOPS – one exaflop is a quintillion floating-point operations per second – and is expected to significantly boost the capabilities of the firm’s AI capabilities and accelerate AI industrialization through the mass production of AI models.
SenseTime currently has 23 AI supercomputing clusters located around the world, and it is understood that the Lingang AIDC will bring its total computing capacity to over 4.91 exaFLOPS.
100-billion parameter models
The AIDC will significantly enhance SenseCore’s capabilities to deliver its AI-as-a-Service offering, providing customers with computation resources and large-scale data management for training AI models at a low cost.
According to SenseTime, the AIDC can provide powerful, elastic, and stable computing capacity for the training of base models with as many as 100 billion parameters.
In machine learning (ML), model parameters are properties of data that will “learn” during the training process and is often used as a measure of how well a model is performing. The number of parameters tends to go up as ML models increase in complexity.
For instance, Baidu AI Research last year announced PLATO-XL, its 11-billion parameter natural language processing model, while Nvidia is talking about the possibility of eventually achieving trillion-parameter computer intelligence.
The AIDC is expected to help SenseTime achieve mass production of a diverse and growing portfolio of AI models with rich functionality and accuracy, improving its research and development (R&D) efficiency, and reducing the marginal costs for production.
“The launch of [AIDC] is a major milestone in our continuous endeavor to build a universal infrastructure for AI innovation. It provides the critical foundations and resources for us to drive digitalization and sustainable development in all walks of life with universal AI capabilities,” said Dr. Xu Li, the co-founder and chief executive officer of SenseTime.
“Working towards our goal of developing a world-class AIDC, we will further open up [our AI capabilities] to both academia and industries to drive future AI productivity, and foster a healthy, prosperous and inclusive AI ecosystem,” he said.
Image credit: iStockphoto/Andy