The US-China trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic have severely impacted global society, and the industrial environment is changing rapidly and in a complex manner. Under these circumstances, accurately predicting future variables through AI, thereby significantly reducing costs and enhancing operational efficiency, has undoubtedly become a key capability for enterprises to face the new competitive landscape.
However, mastering AI is not easy for most companies. It requires not only building hardware and software, but also creating development and maintenance teams. The huge investment often hinders companies with limited resources, causing them to gradually lose competitiveness. To solve this dilemma, it is necessary to learn to make good use of external professional resources.
Established in 2021, Taiwan Smart Cloud Services Co., Ltd. (TWCC) launched Asia's first "commercial high-speed computing AIHPC supercomputer for service industries" service through the TWCC Taiwan AI Cloud Platform. It has created high-efficiency, low-threshold AI smart application and cloud architecture solutions for enterprises. Through AIHPC cloud computing resources, enterprises only need to pay a small fee to enjoy the high performance of a national-level supercomputer system. While quickly building an AI platform, it can also achieve the goals of comprehensive cybersecurity protection and energy conservation and carbon reduction.
Asia's first commercial AIHPC supercomputer platform reduces the cost of AI adoption for enterprises through "3 major advantages".
With the three major advantages of the AIHPC supercomputer high-speed computing system, enterprises can significantly reduce the cost of using AI and rapidly enhance their competitiveness.
AIHPC Advantage 1—High Performance:
Supercomputer computing power significantly reduces the processing time for massive amounts of data.
Databases are an essential mechanism for the operation of AI systems, and the accuracy of the system's inference results is closely related to the amount of data. Therefore, the amount of data collected is increasing, and the GPU workstations in the existing ground infrastructure are unable to handle the load, which will continuously lengthen the computing time and lead to poor project efficiency.
TWCC boasts cross-node high-speed computing, extremely high throughput, high-efficiency storage systems, and ultra-low latency InfiniBand network. In November 2018, it ranked 20th in the world's top 500 high-speed computing hosts (TOP500). Its powerful computing capabilities can shorten the processing time for massive amounts of data. Combined with data processing, model optimization, and other functions, its performance can be improved by up to 100 times, helping enterprises accelerate product launch timelines.
The performance comparison between TWCC and its international counterpart CSP (gray line X) under parallel computing with 64 NVIDIA V100 GPUs is as follows:
Caption: TWCC HPC achieves excellent performance of over 20,000 images per second across nodes, outperforming 39%; RestNet-50 training maintains efficiency nearly 3 times higher across nodes. (Image source: National High-Performance Network and Computing Center, National Research Institute of America)
AIHPC Advantage 2—Low Barrier to Entry:
Save millions of dollars in costs by building AI development environments "on demand" tailored to individual enterprise needs.
IT is becoming increasingly important to modern enterprises. As business scale expands and the frequency of external cyberattacks increases, enterprises must invest heavily in expanding the functionality of their IT systems and strengthening cybersecurity defenses. In recent years, AI has become an important global industry trend, leading to even more staggering investments in related systems and human resources.
TWCC Taiwan AI Cloud Platform's AIHPC system significantly reduces the difficulty for enterprises to enter the AI field, helping them save millions of US dollars in setup costs. It also allows them to select the software and functions they need on demand, and build an AI development environment in minutes through a simple and easy-to-use interface.
Caption: AIHPC offers on-demand payment services for high-speed computing: short-term rentals are billed by the second, long-term rentals offer discounts and rewards, and provide a variety of flexible payment options.
Caption: AIHPC's high-speed computing and user-friendly interface: A development environment can be set up in minutes through simple point-and-click operations.
In terms of cybersecurity deployment, AIHPC also has a "home advantage". Since TWCC is the largest public cloud in Taiwan, with its data center located in Taiwan, it can ensure that sensitive data does not leave the country or overseas. For the financial industry and high-tech industry, business information often involves sensitivity and security, and using TWCC can provide greater peace of mind.
AIHPC Advantage 3—Energy Saving and Carbon Reduction:
Taiwan's greenest high-speed computing server ever! It can save businesses 48% on energy.
The issue of carbon reduction remains a hot topic, and ESG has become an important strategy for companies to pursue sustainable survival. This is especially true for Taiwan, which is closely connected with global industries. Large foreign companies are now requiring suppliers to provide carbon reduction data. Therefore, for Taiwanese companies, energy conservation has changed from an option to a necessity.
The AIHPC system architecture was designed with energy efficiency in mind from the planning stage. Its energy consumption has been greatly optimized, and the energy efficiency of the data center reaches 11.285 GF/W. It is the most energy-efficient high-speed computing host in Taiwan's history. Its energy efficiency ranks 10th in the Green500 (the world's 500 largest green supercomputers). Compared with a host of the same size built by an enterprise, it can save 48% of energy, saving up to 45,000 kWh of electricity per year and reducing carbon emissions by 225,000 tons. Enterprises can use this to promote green transformation and create a better society.
Photo caption: Taiwan's Sugi-2 supercomputer (Image source: National Center for High-Performance Computing, Applied Research Laboratories)
AIHPC is suitable for various fields
AIHPC, with its powerful computing performance, low entry barrier, and energy saving and carbon reduction advantages, is suitable for various fields such as smart manufacturing, smart healthcare, smart finance, smart transportation, and smart city construction.
existSmart HealthcareIn this field, the Food Industry Research and Development Institute (hereinafter referred to as "the Institute") has integrated its long-accumulated microbial database, microbial gene research and microbial fermentation process with the cloud-based high-speed computing resources of the TWCC platform and introduced AI models. While doing a good job in food epidemic prevention, it hopes to accurately strengthen personal immunity and help the people of Taiwan to cope with emerging viral infections at any time.
Chen Chien-Chi, a senior researcher at the Food Research Institute’s Center for Biological Resources Conservation and Research, pointed out that in the past, relying on the Food Research Institute’s own servers, it would take at least a week to complete the computation of the genomes of small microorganisms. After switching to the TWCC environment, it only takes 2 to 3 days to complete the task.
existSmart RetailIn this field, iKala, a Taiwanese AI multinational company, is also using TWCC Taiwan AI Cloud to accelerate AI model development, actively targeting AI modules for direct-to-consumer (D2C) businesses and brands, as well as the development of the new retail industry.
TWCC's powerful GPU computing resources enabled iKala's AI technology team to process over 100 million social media data points on a large scale, while also rapidly performing data analysis and accelerating language model training by 8 times. In computer vision-related technology development processes, such as object detection and semantic segmentation, the model iteration speed was increased by approximately 10 times, achieving high-accuracy optimization and high training efficiency in a very short time. This enabled businesses to more quickly enhance their commercial value and explore new retail opportunities through data insights.
In the field of smart finance, Yao-Ren Hu, CTO of TOPPAN iDGate, an expert in online and mobile transaction identity verification, pointed out that "TWCC provided by Taiwan Cloud has stronger computing power than other public cloud platforms' virtual environment, and its AI computing environment has a high degree of integration. It also provides localized professional technical support, faster processing speed, and more affordable prices. It has been a key factor in helping the company participate in NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) evaluations and achieve excellent results."
Meta and Tesla are both building their own supercomputers! Small and medium-sized enterprises need to learn to "make good use of external resources".
In recent years, AI has become a crucial topic across various vertical industries. These industries, with their diverse needs, can all leverage AIHPC to easily create optimal AI architectures, thereby optimizing operational efficiency. Manufacturers can improve production line processes and efficiency through big data; the medical industry can utilize powerful computing to shorten the processing and analysis time of clinical trial data; the financial industry can detect transaction risks in a short time through rapid computation; transportation systems can use broadband communication and high-performance processors to analyze traffic flow in real time; and urban development can use AIHPC to integrate the Internet of Things to provide citizens with accurate and real-time information.
Utilizing supercomputers to develop various AI functions to enhance competitiveness is gradually becoming a necessary measure for enterprises to face industry competition. Global leading companies such as Meta and Tesla have already built their own supercomputers as the foundation for AI development. Small and medium-sized enterprises must know how to use external resources and maximize their own value through the industry's professional division of labor mechanism. AIHPC provided by Taiwan AI Cloud is not only the most professional AI cloud service in Taiwan, but also comparable to global supercomputers. Enterprises can use the low-threshold feature of this platform to intelligently build an AI architecture that suits their own needs in the most efficient way and stand in the new era of intelligence.
Source:Science and Technology DailyImage source: Shutterstock