Inspur and Baidu jointly launch OpenAI-compliant open-standard AI computing platform for Chinese market.
Inspur, a leading data center and AI full-stack solutions provider, announced two AI-technology driven open computing systems on September 27, 2019. The X-MAN 4.0, developed with Baidu, is the world's first OAI (Open Accelerator Infrastructure) compliant and liquid cooling rack-scale AI computing product optimized specifically for deep neural network applications. The Inspur OAI UBB system, meanwhile, is a 21-inch Full-Rack OAM solution delivering efficiency, flexibility and management.
Workloads in data centers are growing more diverse and complex with artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies spreading rapidly. Internet companies face significant challenges with AI's increasing hardware complexity—integrating an AI accelerator typically takes 6 to 12 months. The OAI specification, led by Baidu, Facebook and Microsoft in the OCP (Open Compute Project) community, unifies the technical specifications of the accelerator module and simplifies the design complexity of the AI accelerator system, thereby shortening time to market for the hardware system. As a key promoter of OAI UBB development with OCP, Inspur has rapidly followed up on this standard with solutions to help customers accelerate business innovation.
X-MAN 4.0, the fourth generation of Baidu's X-MAN series of full-rack AI computing products, provides powerful performance with strong scalability and interconnect technology. The system includes eight AI accelerators in a single box and scales to 32 AI accelerators per rack, with boxes interconnected through QSFP-DD cables to minimize communication latency across nodes. As the first in Baidu's series to introduce OAM-compliant accelerators, X-MAN 4.0 allows accelerator resources to be specified in a software-defined manner, enabling flexible, multi-vendor support for AI applications of different workloads. Baidu's X-MAN series products pioneered hardware disaggregation in X-MAN 1.0, liquid cooling in X-MAN 2.0, and modular and open design in X-MAN 3.0, with Baidu contributing these concepts to the OCP community and designing the first OAI compliant and liquid cooling AI computing system.
The newly launched OAI UBB system delivers breakthrough efficiency, flexibility and management through simplified inter-module communication to scale up and input/output bandwidth to scale out, supporting disparate network architectures through OAM direct connection. Inspur features two of the three OCP interconnect topologies: Hybrid Cube Mesh (HCM) and Fully Connected (FC). "Inspur continues to pioneer the technologies that enable next-generation AI applications," said Peter Peng, Inspur Group senior vice president. "As a member of the OCP, Open 19 and ODCC global open computing standards organizations, Inspur has always been an active promoter of open source technology to help users build open data centers."
Inspur is a leading provider of data center infrastructure, cloud computing, and AI solutions, ranking among the world's top 3 server manufacturers. Through engineering and innovation, Inspur delivers cutting-edge computing hardware design and extensive product offerings to address open computing, cloud data center, AI and deep learning. The company's performance-optimized and purpose-built solutions empower customers to tackle specific workloads and real-world challenges.