At Huawei Connect 2019, the Chinese telecom giant announced its strategy for the computing market and has released Atlas 900, which is claimed to be the world’s fastest AI training cluster. The company says that Atlas 900 will help make AI more readily available for different fields of scientific research and business innovation.
Atlas 900 combines the power of thousands of Ascend processors and takes only 59.8 seconds to train ResNet-50 for measuring AI training performance. This is 10 seconds faster than the previous world record.
It brings new possibilities to different fields of scientific research and business innovation – astronomy, weather forecasting, autonomous driving, oil exploration, etc. Huawei also deployed Atlas 900 on Huawei Cloud as a cluster service, making it more accessible to its customers across different industries.
Based on Huawei’s experience in over 500 projects across more than 10 industries, Zheng Yelai, President of Huawei’s Cloud BU, pointed out that industry AI is crossing the commercial chasm and becoming the key driver for reshaping how companies go digital.
Huawei estimates that in the next five years, statistical computing will become the mainstream and AI computing will account for more than 80 percent of all computing power used around the world. Huawei’s strategy will focus on four key areas:
- Architecture innovation – Huawei has launched the Da Vinci architecture, an innovative processor architecture. The company will continue to invest in basic research.
- Investment in all-scenario processors – Huawei has a full lineup of processors: Kunpeng processors for general purpose computing, Ascend processors for AI, Kirin processors for smart devices, and Honghu processors for smart screens.
- Clear business boundaries – Huawei won’t sell its processors directly. Instead, it will provide them to its customers in the form of cloud services, and to its partners in the form of components, prioritizing support for integrated solutions.
- Building an open ecosystem – In the next five years, Huawei will invest another $1.5 billion in its developer program. The aim is to expand the program to support five million developers and enable Huawei’s worldwide partners to develop new applications.
Commenting on the company’s strategy, Ken Hu, Huawei’s Deputy Chairman said: “The future of computing is a massive market worth more than two trillion US dollars. We’ll keep investing with a strategy that focuses on four key areas. We will push the boundaries of architecture, invest in processors for all scenarios, keep clear business boundaries, and build an open ecosystem.”
