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Research Highlights, Creation of an AI Research Infrastructure for Industry, Academia and Government; Start of "ABCI" Supercomputer Operation

Information Technology and Human Factors

Creation of an AI Research Infrastructure for Industry, Academia and Government; Start of "ABCI" Supercomputer Operation

OGAWA Hirotaka
Artificial Intelligence Research Center

Large-scale cloud computing system ABCI with highest performance in Japan starts full-scale operation

The "AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI)" cloud computing system started operation from August 1, 2018. This system earned 5th place in the TOP500 List that ranks supercomputers around the world in terms of speed performance and 4th place in the Green500 List that ranks supercomputers around the world in terms of energy efficiency.

Figure: Left: A section of the ABCI computing node rack; Center: Part of the cooling system; Right: The AI Data Center

Left: A section of the ABCI computing node rack; Center: Part of the cooling system; Right: The AI Data Center

The high computing power required for the combination of big data and algorithms to develop artificial intelligence technology

The ABCI computing system was designed and developed by the Artificial Intelligence Research Center (AIRC) of AIST and the AIST-Tokyo Tech Real World Big-Data Computation Open Innovation Laboratory (RWBC-OIL), and constructed in the AI Data Center building at AIST Kashiwa.

Photo: A section of the ABCI computing node rack

Realization of world's 5th-highest computational performance (at time of development)

ABCI is equipped with 4352 of the latest high performance, energy efficient GPUs, and the processing units and other parts that become high temperature are cooled directly by cooling water with a temperature close to that of the outside air supplied by the AI Data Center building. This helped achieve computing power of 19.88 petaFLOPS, which placed 5th in the world in the TOP500 List and is the highest performance in Japan for an actually operated computing system. ABCI also achieved energy efficiency of 14.423 gigaFLOPS per watt, which placed 4th in the world in the Green500 List.

Photo: The cooling system

Accelerate R&D and Demonstration of AI technology and promote social implementation

In the future, published learned models and open data will be provided on ABCI, and ABCI will be used as a large-scale, high-speed computing infrastructure for AI technology R&D to promote the social implementation of AI through collaboration of industry, academia and government and to challenge key issues in the AI field.

Photo: OGAWA Hirotaka

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