Chinese supercomputer successfully processes AI model as complex as human brain

According to a new announcement by a group of Chinese scientists, the new version of the country's Sunway supercomputer has reached speeds so high that it can successfully process complex artificial intelligence (AI) models exactly like the human brain.

With such outstanding speed, it is no surprise that Sunway is ranked on par with Frontier, the latest supercomputer of the US Department of Energy. Frontier was recently recognized as the world's most powerful supercomputer. Earlier this year, the old version of Sunway dropped to 6th place in the top fastest supercomputers in the world.

The AI ​​model mentioned in the scientists' report is BaGuaLu with 174,000 billion parameters. This is the first time a supercomputer can process AI with the same number of parameters as the number of synapses in the human brain.

This research could have applications in areas such as self-driving vehicles, facial recognition, natural language processing, life sciences and chemistry.

In more detail about the new version of Sunway, researchers shared that it has a speed of 1 billion operations/1 second and possesses more than 37 million CPU cores, 4 times more than Frontier. In addition, Sunway also resembles a human brain thanks to 9 petabytes of memory and 96,000 semi-independent computer systems that act as nodes.

Nodes on Sunway can communicate with each other at 23 petabytes per second, simulating human decision-making. The supercomputer can also work on tasks in parallel, like a person eating while watching TV.