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Facebook Open Sources AI Hardware Design (facebook.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the see-what-you-can-do-with-this dept.

UnknowingFool writes: Facebook has released specifications on their newest Open Rack-compatible hardware server they named Big Sur. It is for AI computing at a large scale. Using eight 300W GPU slots the server is touted to offer more efficient neural network training by using GPUs. The announcement reads in part: "We plan to open-source Big Sur and will submit the design materials to the Open Compute Project (OCP). Facebook has a culture of support for open source software and hardware, and FAIR has continued that commitment by open-sourcing our code and publishing our discoveries as academic papers freely available from open-access sites. We're very excited to add hardware designed for AI research and production to our list of contributions to the community. We want to make it a lot easier for AI researchers to share techniques and technologies. As with all hardware systems that are released into the open, it's our hope that others will be able to work with us to improve it. We believe that this open collaboration helps foster innovation for future designs, putting us all one step closer to building complex AI systems that bring this kind of innovation to our users and, ultimately, help us build a more open and connected world."

3 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Re: The AI fanatics must be getting really despera by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I wonder if anyone has calculated how many parallel processes and how much instantly accessible RAM would be needed to simulate the human brain. I'm guessing the compute power needed would be jaw dropping.

    http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163051-simulating-1-second-of-human-brain-activity-takes-82944-processors

    "It took 40 minutes with the combined muscle of 82,944 processors in K computer to get just 1 second of biological brain processing time. While running, the simulation ate up about 1PB of system memory"

  2. Re:Where are the specs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Telsa M40s
    http://www.nextplatform.com/2015/12/10/facebook-to-open-up-custom-machine-learning-iron/

  3. Facebook's open source license contains evil terms by gonz · · Score: 4, Informative

    A friend of mine works at a company where the lawyers reviewed Facebook's "open source" licensing terms (surreptitiously buried in a text file entitled "Additional Grant of Patent Rights") and concluded that it isn't safe. They issued a company-wide order that all projects must immediately remove any Facebook open source with these license terms. The terms basically allow Facebook to unilaterally terminate the open source license if you take "any action" against their patent claims. The exact wording is:

    "The license granted hereunder will terminate, automatically and without notice, if you (or any of your subsidiaries, corporate affiliates or agents) initiate directly or indirectly, or take a direct financial interest in, any Patent Assertion: (i) against Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, (ii) against any party if such Patent Assertion arises in whole or in part from any software, technology, product or service of Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates, or (iii) against any party relating to the Software."

    ...


    A "Patent Assertion" is any lawsuit or other action alleging direct, indirect,
    or contributory infringement or inducement to infringe any patent, including a
    cross-claim or counterclaim.

    In this thread, a Google employee says that their lawyers came to the same conclusion:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

    If so, why would Facebook do this? Why isn't it more widely discussed?