LEADERSHIP
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)
Vice President and Deputy Director General, Department of Information Technology and Human Factors
Satoshi Sekiguchi
It is my great honor to announce that AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI), the world's first large-scale Open AI Computing Infrastructure, is now fully operational and ready for researchers and businesses to use for innovative AI research and development. With the progression of the third wave of AI, it is now possible to feed computers large amounts of data as inputs for deep learning to predict complicated events in the real world with high accuracy close to humans. This achievement allows AI to relieve humans from repetitive intellectual tasks just as robots have freed humans from simple manual tasks. Additionally, it is highly expected that AI will expand its applications beyond our imagination, through the combination of large-scale data generation by computer simulations and deep learning.
The goals of ABCI is to (1) develop AI technologies that will help scale components of other technologies that are used in real world problems, (2) provide industry, academia and researchers computing services comparative to private giants who own massive in-house computing resources, (3) provide the computing power that is the foundation of a new collaborative AI ecosystem. Furthermore, we will explore new business models for industries that do not have the IT resources for expert machine learning solutions and for AI Data Center businesses that are expected to grow in the future.
The day when artificial intelligence technology is used as "commonplace" has arrived. I encourage everyone to collaborate with AIST and use ABCI to accelerate open innovation and address real world challenges.
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)
Artificial Intelligence Research Center
Team Leader, Artificial Intelligence Cloud Research Team
Hirotaka Ogawa
In order to accelerate the integration of state-of-the-art AI R&D activities and AI technologies within society, we need; (1) Algorithms such as deep learning, (2) Big Data acquired from the real world, and (3) Massive Computing Power. The purpose of ABCI is to provide the world's top-class machine learning and data processing platform to promote open innovation through cooperation among the three elements above.
ABCI adopts de facto hardware and software for HPC and AI allowing ABCI users to enjoy the benefits of a wide range of software ecosystems. Software including various deep learning frameworks are preinstalled and can be used immediately. Additionally, it is easy to use software and trained models developed on ABCI, in various environments such as commercial cloud services and/or PC. Containers make it easy to install software and share software assets in various communities.
ABCI also provides large-capacity and high-speed shared storage systems for collecting, storing, and using big data acquired from the real world as well as training models and training data. By this winter, we will introduce encrypted data infrastructures that will comply with laws and international security standards, to promote the security of data stored and processed on ABCI. We will continue to enhance ABCI to improve its environment for securely managing data from storage, sharing capabilities, accessing learning models, etc.
Lastly, we will proactively contribute to academic activities by creating opportunities such as the ABCI Grand Challenge Program, provide computing resources to HPCI, and create top notch research results.