Originally posted to Data Center Frontier by Rich Miller,

With Big Basin, Facebook Beefs Up its AI HardwareSANTA CLARA, Calif. – Facebook is beefing up its high performance computing horsepower, enhancing its use of artificial intelligence to personalize your news feed.

Facebook introduced brawny new hardware to power its AI workloads today at the 2017 Open Compute Summit at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Known as Big Basin, the unit brings more memory to its GPU-powered data crunching. It’s a beefier successor to Big Sur, the first-generation Facebook AI server unveiled last July.

“With Big Basin, we can train machine learning models that are 30 percent larger because of the availability of greater arithmetic throughput and a memory increase from 12 GB to 16 GB,” said Kevin Lee, a Technical Program Manager at Facebook. “This enables our researchers and engineers to move more quickly in developing increasingly complex AI models that aim to help Facebook further understand text, photos, and videos on our platforms and make better predictions based on this content.”

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