Huawei Unveils AI Ecosystem Program in Europe, with 100M Euros Investment

At HUAWEI ECO-CONNECT EUROPE 2019, Huawei officially released the AI Ecosystem Program in Europe and announced an investment of 100 million euros in the next 5 years. This program unlocks a new chapter for the computing industry in Europe.

4 Initiatives Underpinning the AI Ecosystem Program

According to Jiang Tao, VP of Intelligent Computing BU, "Huawei is committed to investing in the AI computing industry in Europe, enabling enterprises and individual developers to leverage the Ascend AI series products for technological and business innovation. Over the next 5 years, Huawei plans to invest 100 million euros in the AI Ecosystem Program in Europe, helping industry organizations, 200,000 developers, 500 ISV partners, and 50 universities and research institutes to boost innovation." The 4 initiatives of the program are as follows:

First, Huawei will work with partners to shape the AI industry in Europe. Specifically, Huawei will collaborate with key organizations in three important areas:

•Improve regulations and standards on AI ethics and security together with the European AI Alliance and European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)
•Work with the Big Data Value Association (BDVA) to promote the AI Public-Private Partnership (PPP) across the EU, helping boost AI research and vertical industry development
•Nurture the AI university ecosystem in Europe through academic platforms, like the Falling Walls Foundation

Second, Huawei will develop joint solutions with ISV partners. The OpenLabs in Munich and Paris are AI capability centers that support ISV partners in hardware, development and porting, and joint marketing.

Third, based on the Ascend Developer Community, Huawei will organize offline technological salons and developer contests, and provide technological support to enable developers.

Fourth, Huawei will provide partners with AI courses and teaching materials, and establish joint labs in Europe. 3 AI courses designed for universities will cover basic AI theory, Ascend and mainstream framework development, and Ascend software architecture and development guides. 4 teaching materials on Ascend development will be released in 2020. In addition, Huawei will establish joint labs with partner universities and research institutes for algorithm model development and basic applications.

The Full Atlas Product Lineup Unleashes Ultimate Computing Power for Training

At HUAWEI CONNECT 2019 (Shanghai), Huawei launched a broad product portfolio based on the Ascend 910, the industry's most powerful AI training processor. The products include the Atlas 300 AI training card, Atlas 800 training server, and Atlas 900 AI training cluster. The Atlas series products support all scenarios across device-edge-cloud, accelerating intelligent transformation of industries with ultimate computing power for training.

The Atlas 300 training card provides computing power up to 256 TFLOPS, doubling that of the industry's mainstream training cards. With Atlas 300, the number of images trained per second soars from 965 to 1,802. The Atlas 300 supports direct 100G RoCE interfaces for parallel transmission of gradient parameters and datasets, reducing the gradient synchronization latency by up to 70% and slashing the cluster training time to seconds.

The Atlas 800 AI training server integrates 8 Ascend 910 AI processors in a 4U space. It provides computing power up to 2 PFLOPS, with computing power density 2.5x that of industry counterparts. The Atlas 800 weighs only 75 kg, which is less than half of the industry average. It has 32 built-in hardware decoders that decode 16,384 1,080p images per second, outperforming the processing capability of mainstream products by 25x. Besides, the Atlas 800 enables parallel processing of image decoding and training. The Atlas 800 supports air and liquid cooling, meeting requirements of enterprise data centers and high-density cluster deployment. The energy efficiency of a single Atlas 800 server is 1.8 times that of peer products.

The Atlas 900 AI training cluster contains 1,024 Ascend 910 AI processors. The ResNet-50 image classification model is the most authoritative standard measuring AI computing power. It takes Atlas 900 just 59.8s to train a ResNet-50 model in the test. With the same precision, the Atlas 900 breaks the previous world record by 10 seconds for being the world's fastest AI training cluster. The powerful computing of Atlas 900 makes a difference in scientific research and business innovation, such as astronomical exploration, weather forecasting, autonomous driving, and oil exploration.

Huawei Signs AI-based Joint Solution MoUs with StoryTemple B.V. and AGS Italy

StoryTemple B.V. is an AI start-up in the Netherlands that developed a cutting-edge interactive storytelling platform. Object recognition algorithms provide the platform with a novel way to interact with presentations using physical objects.

StoryTemple B.V. deploys Huawei's Atlas AI computing platform to run the storytelling platform and to improve model training speed. The interactive presentations can be applied across enterprises, retail, events, education and more.

Advanced Global Solution (AGS) is an Italian company that offers innovative IT services and solutions: Artificial Intelligence, state-of-the-art technologies and projects that fully meet the requirements of the Industry 4.0 Plan. The MoU signed by Huawei and AGS is focused on the development of joint AI solutions in the fields of intelligent quality inspection in the manufacturing industry, intelligent account onboarding and customer profiling in different industrial areas such as energy, GDO, Telco and banking.

Huawei Certified ICT Expert (HCIE) Launched for Intelligent Computing & Ascend

Driven by another industrial transformation, the technological industry is developing rapidly, calling for a large number of talents. To bridge the gap, Huawei offers Huawei Intelligent Computing & Ascend HCIE Certification in Europe for the first time, which includes three levels: Huawei Certified ICT Associate (HCIA), Huawei Certified ICT Professional (HCIP), and Huawei Certified ICT Expert (HCIE). This is a multi-tiered training certification system for the ICT industry, and also an authoritative standard for IT talent development. According to Lin Sheng, intelligent computing BU Global Service Vice President in Huawei, "The HCIE for intelligent computing aims to gain insights into the computing ecosystem, optimize key technologies and application systems, design intelligent computing solution architecture, and apply intelligent computing solution technologies. This certification system will help develop intelligent computing talents, who will in turn contribute to the ICT industry."