Microsoft Build 2020: Company reveals new Azure cloud based supercomputer built in collaboration with OpenAI

It features over 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs and 400 gigabits per second of network connectivity for each GPU server.

The supercomputer, as mentioned by the firm in a blog post, is built in collaboration with and exclusively for OpenAI. (Pixabay)

AI Supercomputer (Microsoft)

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AI Supercomputer (Microsoft)

Although Machine Learning experts have previously made separate, smaller AI models that can learn single tasks like translating between languages, recognizing objects, reading text to identify key points in an email and more, Microsoft thinks a single large AI model can perform tasks better.

“As part of a companywide AI at Scale initiative, Microsoft has developed its own family of large AI models, the Microsoft Turing models, which it has used to improve many different language understanding tasks across Bing, Office, Dynamics and other productivity products.”

And to train these large AI modes, Microsoft has built a supercomputer. “Training massive AI models requires advanced supercomputing infrastructure, or clusters of state-of-the-art hardware connected by high-bandwidth networks. It also needs tools to train the models across these interconnected computers,” adds the firm.