Facebook makes the hardware it uses for AI open-source
'Big Sur' is an open-rack-compatible GPU-accelerated hardware platform for artificial intelligence
You might not think of it often, but behind the scenes Facebook uses a lot of artificial intelligence. The company leans heavy on AI, using machine learning to curate a better news feed, sort through photo and video content and even read stories or play games. Now, the company is making Big Sur, the hardware it runs its AI experiments on, open-source.
Facebook says it will release its AI hardware design to the Open Compute Project soon, promising to give the community a system designed specifically for AI tasks built from off-the-shelf components. This design features eight NVIDIA Tesla M40 GPUs seated into an easily serviceable motherboard. "The CPU heat sinks are the only things you need a screwdriver for," the company says.
"We want to make it a lot easier for AI researchers to share techniques and technologies," the company said in a statement today. "We believe that this open collaboration helps foster innovation for future designs, putting us all one step closer to building complex AI systems." Sounds pretty good. Check out the source link below for Facebook's official announcement.