AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure

AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) is a planned supercomputer being built at the University of Tokyo for use in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning.^[4][5] It is being built by Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. ABCI is expected to be completed in first quarter 2018 with a planned performance of 130 petaFLOPS. Power consumption is targeting 3 megawatts, and a planned power usage effectiveness of 1.1. If performance meets expectations, ABCI would be the second most powerful supercomputer built, surpassing the current leader Sunway TaihuLight's 93 petaflops.^[6] But still behind the Summit supercomputer.

AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure

Active	Expected to be operational in 1Q 2018[1]
Sponsors	Fujitsu[2]
Operators	National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
Location	University of Tokyo
Architecture	2176 Intel Xeon Gold 4352 Nvidia Tesla V100
Power	3 MW
Speed	550 petaFLOPS FP16 37 petaFLOPS FP64
Cost	¥19.5 billion[3]

History

In November 2014 it was announced that a 160 petaFLOPS system will be built for ¥19.5 billion (US$172.4 million – US$231.8 million), with construction to begin in 2017.^[3][7]

In October 2017 Fujitsu got the contract to build a 37 petaFLOPS system for US$44.3 million.^[8][9]

Design

The design of the ABCI is to be focused on low precision floating point, big data, and artificial intelligence applications; rather than Linpack performance.^[10]

Projects

The ABCI is planned to be available to Japanese corporations, small businesses, and researchers; reducing their dependence on foreign cloud computing providers such as Microsoft and Google.^[7]