By Li Panpan

Alibaba Cloud announced on August 30 the official launch of its Zhangbei Super Intelligent Computing Center, the world’s largest one, supported by its Aspara full-stack intelligent computing solution, which can increase AI training efficiency by 11 times, reported JW Insights.

Zhangbei Super Intelligent Computing Center has a total construction scale of 12 EFLOPS (12 quintillion floating-point operations per second) AI computing power, surpassing Google’s 9 EFLOPS and Tesla’s 1.8 EFLOPS. It can provide powerful intelligent computing services for AI large model training, automated driving, spatial geography and other AI exploration applications.

Alibaba Cloud also officially launched its full-stack intelligent computing solution, “Aspara Intelligent Computing Platform,” which provides two modes of public and private cloud access, offering powerful intelligent computing services for scientific research, enterprises, and institutions. Through advanced technical architecture, it has achieved 90% parallel computing efficiency of 1000 cores, increasing the utilization rate of computing power resources by more than three times, AI training efficiency by 11 times, and reasoning efficiency by six times.

In addition to the Zhangbei Center, Alibaba Cloud also started up its Ulanqab Intelligent Computing Center, with a construction scale of 3 EFLOPS AI computing power, which is located at the “east-to-west computing resource transfer project” hub node of Inner Mongolia, and adopts green technologies such as natural air cooling and AI temperature adjustment to pursue low-carbon development.

Cai Yinghua, president of Alibaba Cloud Global Sales, said computing is a vast and complex system, and computing power cannot be accumulated without systematic core technical capabilities, let alone bring actual industrial value. 

Aspara Intelligent Computing Platform provides an overall solution of integrated computing power and big data AI based on its Panjiu infrastructure. It can run on servers with various chip types such as X86, GPU, and ARM, realizing “one cloud, multiple cores” and support the mixed deployment and unified scheduling of multiple processors, as well as application optimizing, improving some performances by more than 100%.

Alibaba Cloud revealed that the Aspara Intelligent Computing Platform had been widely used in the group, supporting the development of cutting-edge AI and e-commerce intelligent technology at the company’s DAMO Academy. The platform has also been used by XPengMotors, DP Technology, SAIC, China Meteorological Administration, China Southern Power Grid, and other institutions and enterprises, while supporting industries such as automated driving, drug R&D, weather forecasting, and industrial energy companies to greatly improve their AI training efficiency.