Huawei releases Atlas 900, the world’s fastest AI training cluster

On September 18, At Huawei Connect 2019, Huawei released Atlas 900, the world’s fastest AI training cluster that will help make AI more broadly available for different kinds of fields.

Atlas 900 AI cluster is built upon Huawei’s Da Vinci architecture for 2X performance and consists of thousands of Ascend 910 AI processor. It integrates the HCCS, PCIe 4.0, and 100G RoCE high-speed interfaces through Huawei cluster communication library and job scheduling platform, to unlock the full potential of Ascend 910.

Atlas 900 delivers up to 256–1024 PFLOPS at FP16, equivalent to the computing power of 500,000 PCs.

According to Huawei, it takes Atlas 900 only 59.8 seconds to train ResNet-50, the gold standard for measuring AI training performance. This is 10 seconds faster than the previous world record.

This much faster AI processing makes Atlas 900 perfectly suitable for various fields of scientific research and businesses including images and speech processing, more efficient astronomical and oil exploration, weather forecast, and for autonomous driving.