Supercomputer of 10 petaflops to help AI in France

Following the Villani report on artificial intelligence and speech at the beginning of the year of the President of the Republic on the strategy of France in the field, the government yesterday presented the main guidelines for research in this area.

This IA research will be funded by the State to the tune of 665 million euros by 2022 and will rely in particular on a network of a small number of Interdisciplinary Institutes of Artificial Intelligence (3IA). They will bring closer public and private research.

This creation of the 3IA network will be the largest item of financing by the State (200 million euros), ahead of the strengthening of international cooperation including a strategy shared with Germany (115 million euros), and investment in the means of calculation (115 million euros).

On this last register, it was announced a supercomputer dedicated to artificial intelligence. With a computing power of over 10 petaflops (10 million billion operations per second), it will be installed at the beginning of 2019 by the national intensive computing operator GENCI at the CNRS Institute for Development and Scientific Computing Resources. on the Saclay plateau.

Such a supercomputer had in fact already been planned beforehand. These classic uses for high-performance computing will be extended for artificial intelligence with more than a thousand specialized processors (GPUs).

This computing power (in any case the GPU) can be exploited with the learning phase of artificial intelligence where an algorithm searches all the parameters allowing a model to perform a task requested with a high level of performance. The model is thus driven.

The Villani report warned, however, " The cases that would fully mobilize a supercomputer adapted to AI are quite rare and only concern a limited field of research. The vast majority of applications require a much smaller amount of resources (resources counting around ten GPU for example), a need that could meet a cloud for the AI. "

Note also that donations from Facebook will be used to increase the computing power available for the AI.