Microsoft OpenAI supercomputer in top 5 most-powerful at launch
Microsoft announced a supercomputer developed for OpenAI this week with power that ranks in the top 5 supercomputers on earth. That's counting the world's publicly disclosed supercomputers, mind you – there may be more powerful computers operating in secret – but this is about computing for the public good. The creation and operation of this new supercomputer was done as part of Microsoft's AI at Scale initiative.
Per Microsoft's announcement this week, the goal with this supercomputer is to make large AI models, training optimization tools, and supercomputing resources available through Azure AI services and GitHub. They're doing this, said a Microsoft representative, "so developers, data scientists and business customers can easily leverage the power of AI at Scale."
"By now most people intuitively understand how personal computers are a platform — you buy one and it's not like everything the computer is ever going to do is built into the device when you pull it out of the box," said Microsoft Chief Technical Officer Kevin Scott. "That's exactly what we mean when we say AI is becoming a platform."
"This is about taking a very broad set of data and training a model that learns to do a general set of things and making that model available for millions of developers to go figure out how to do interesting and creative things with." said Scott.
The supercomputer announced this week, developed for OpenAI, works with one of the most immensely powerful computing setups in the history of the world. This system works with 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs, and 400 gigabits per second of network connectivity, PER GPU server. But can it run Crysis?
Microsoft suggests that their setup would place them in the top 5 supercomputers in the big Top 500 list of the world's top publicly disclosed supercomputers. Microsoft announced this week that they'd "soon" begin open sourcing their Microsoft Turing models and recipes for training them in Azure Machine Learning.