Huawei Launches Atlas 900, ‘The World’s Fastest AI Training Cluster’

At the 2019 Huawei Connect conference, the Chinese telecom giant announced the launch of what it claims is the fastest cluster for training artificial intelligence in the world. The company says that the project named 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.

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It brings new possibilities to different fields of scientific research and business innovation including astronomy, weather forecasting, autonomous driving, oil exploration and more. Huawei also deployed Atlas 900 on Huawei Cloud as a cluster service, making it more accessible to its customers across different industries.

Speaking at the Huawei Connect event, Huawei deputy chair Ken Hu said that the field of computing represented an extraordinary opportunity for the company.

“When most people think of Huawei, they think connections. It’s true we’ve been investing nonstop in connectivity for the past 30 years. From fixed networks to wireless, from 2G, 3G and 4G, all the way up to 5G, we’ve made quite a bit of progress in the industry.”

Huawei’s renewed focus on the computing sector can be seen as a consequence of its long-standing quarrel with the US government. As the US continues to complicate Huawei’s involvement in Europe’s 5G network rollouts, the Chinese tech giant seems adamant about opening up new channels of revenue through its increased focus on AI and computing.

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“The future of computing is a massive market worth more than $2 trillion. 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,” Hu said.