Huawei unveils 'SuperCluster' architecture designed to make 1 million AI chips work as a single computer
Engineers in China have built a new computer architecture they say can one day make up to a million artificial intelligence (AI) chips work as one.
Key points
- But the new architecture, Peerium, uses a high-speed interconnect system designed to maintain efficient communication between chips across multiple racks, even as the number of chips scales into the hundreds of thousands.
- "When one million processors work as one computer, this lays the foundation for better and more efficient AI training and inference," Xu added.
- I believe, in the years to come, other players would certainly follow suit." Stitching together a computing network Alongside Peerium, Huawei also announced the Atlas 950 SuperPoD, a computing system built on Peerium and powered by more than 8,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT AI accelerator chips.
All three principles are designed to make more efficient use of computing resources so that a single system can coordinate larger numbers of chips to handle demanding AI workloads.
"With such a low inter-rack communications bandwidth, there is no way you can make one million processors work as one computer," he said.
Additional details
- According to Huawei, existing interconnect technologies — which link processors and servers to enable them to communicate — cannot support the Peerium architecture at the scale it envisages.
- Nested parallelism allows workloads to be broken into smaller tasks and organized across hierarchical groups of chips that work in parallel.
- "So you need such a scale of infrastructure to train these models." The technology powering Peerium Peerium's performance relies on three elements: nested parallelism, unified memory addressing, and peer-to-peer interconnects, Huawei representatives said in the statement.
- Huawei expects to begin supplying the SuperPoDs by early next year, at the latest, before its SuperClusters, which link multiple SuperPoDs to form a larger AI computing system, based on Peerium, eventually come online.
- For comparison, Elon Musk's AI company, SpaceXAI (soon to be SpaceXSI), describes its Colossus cluster as the world's most powerful AI training system, comprising 200,000 interconnected chips.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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