AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) is a planned

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

being built at the University of Tokyo for use in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and

deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. De ...

. It is being built by

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. ABCI is expected to be completed in first quarter 2018 with a planned performance of 130 petaFLOPS. Power consumption is targeting 3 megawatts, and a planned power usage effectiveness of 1.1. If performance meets expectations, ABCI would be the second most powerful supercomputer built, surpassing the current leader

Sunway TaihuLight The Sunway TaihuLight ( ''Shénwēi·tàihú zhī guāng'') is a Chinese supercomputer which, , is ranked fourth in the TOP500 list, with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops. The name is translated as ''divine power, the light of Taihu Lak ...

's 93 petaflops. But still behind the Summit (supercomputer).

History

In November 2014 it was announced that a 160 petaFLOPS system will be built for ( – ), with construction to begin in 2017. In October 2017 Fujitsu got the contract to build a 37 petaFLOPS system for .

Design

The design of the ABCI is to be focused on

low precision Accuracy and precision are two measures of ''observational error''. ''Accuracy'' is how close a given set of measurements ( observations or readings) are to their ''true value'', while ''precision'' is how close the measurements are to each oth ...

floating point,

big data Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...

, and artificial intelligence applications; rather than Linpack performance.

Projects

The ABCI is planned to be available to Japanese corporations, small businesses, and researchers; reducing their dependence on foreign cloud computing providers such as Microsoft and Google.

References

{{Reflist Fujitsu supercomputers GPGPU supercomputers Petascale computers Supercomputing in Japan University of Tokyo X86 supercomputers