Microsoft announces one of world’s most powerful supercomputers to train large AI models

Microsoft at its Build 2020 developer’s conference, hosted online, announced a new supercomputer in partnership with OpenAI. This supercomputer will be used to train extremely large artificial intelligence models and is hosted on Azure. “Compared with other machines listed on the TOP500 supercomputers in the world, it ranks in the top five,” claims Microsoft.
The supercomputer developed for OpenAI is a single system with more than 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs and 400 gigabits per second of network connectivity for each GPU server.
“The exciting thing about these models is the breadth of things they’re going to enable. This is about being able to do a hundred exciting things in natural language processing at once and a hundred exciting things in computer vision, and when you start to see combinations of these perceptual domains, you’re going to have new applications that are hard to even imagine right now,” said Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott.