TOKYO, JAPAN — Preferred Networks, Inc. (PFN), a provider of IoT-centric deep learning systems, NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), the ICT solutions and international communications business within the NTT Group, and NTT Com subsidiary NTT PC Communications Incorporated (NTT PC) announced today that PFN will launch an expanded version of its MN-1 private sector supercomputer equipped with NTT Com and NTTPC's next-generation GPU platform by July. The new MN-1b supercomputer will adopt the NVIDIA® Tesla® V100 32GB, that was announced at GTC 2018 on March 27, 2018 (U.S. time).

PFN plans to enhance MN-1 by adding 512 NVIDIA Tesla V100 32GB GPUs and have them up and running by July, with the added GPUs having a theoretical peak performance of about 56 PetaFLOPS¹, a massive 56,000 trillion floating-point operations per second, based on a mixed precision floating-point operation² used in deep learning. This means the expansion alone will contribute to a roughly threefold increase from the current peak.

PFN expects the new supercomputer's extra high speed and massive processing environment leveraging the latest GPUs will accelerate the real-world applications of its research and development in deep learning and related technologies and thereby strengthen PFN's global competitiveness. NTT Com and NTT PC will build and operate the multi-node platform leveraging the latest GPUs that meets PFN's requirements, using their knowledge of intra-GPU communication and waste heat processing.

"We are truly honored that Preferred Networks has chosen NVIDIA Tesla V100 32GB, most advanced data center GPU with 2X the memory, for its next-generation private supercomputer's computation environment, "MN-1b". With NTT Com Group's experience of establishing and managing highly reliable data center services, combined with NVIDIA's latest high-speed GPUs for deep learning, we sincerely look forward to R&D results in the fields of transportation systems, manufacturing and biotech/healthcare." said Masataka Osaki, Vice President of Corporate Sales and NVIDIA Japan Country Manager.

Emmy Chang, Board Director, Supermicro KK and VP of Strategic Sales, Supermicro said "Preferred Networks is the first in the world to deploy our SuperServer® 4029GP-TRT2 equipped with the latest version of Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and supporting eight NVIDIA Tesla V100 32GB GPU accelerators," "Preferred Networks has developed the world-class private supercomputer through cooperative work with NTT Com Group, and Supermicro continues to support them with our latest innovative hardware and solutions. We are confident that Preferred Networks will achieve new heights with its new private supercomputer."

PFN will use the new MN-1b to raise the speed of its Chainer™ open source deep-learning framework and further accelerate its research and development in fields that require a huge amount of computing resources, namely transportation systems, manufacturing, bio-healthcare, and creativity.

Going forward, NTT Com expects to increasingly support the delivery of AI technologies and related platforms for advanced research and commercialized deep learning, including the AI business initiatives of PFN.

Related links:

Chainer

Enterprise Cloud

Nexcenter

Notes:

1. A unit measuring computer performance. Peta is 1,000 trillion (10 to the power of 15) and FLOPS is used to count floating-point operations per second. So, 1 PetaFLOPS means that a computer is capable of performing 1,000 trillion floating-point calculations per second.

2. Mixed precision floating-point operation is a method of floating point arithmetic operations with combination of multiple precisions.

Chainer™ is a trademark or a registered trademark of Preferred Networks, Inc. in Japan and other countries. Other company names and product names written in this release are the trademarks or the registered trademarks of each company.

About Preferred Networks, Inc.

Founded in March 2014 with the aim of promoting business utilization of deep learning technology focused on IoT, PFN advocates Edge Heavy Computing as a way to handle the enormous amounts of data generated by devices in a distributed and collaborative manner at the edge of the network, driving innovation in three priority business areas: transportation, manufacturing and bio/healthcare. PFN develops and provides Chainer, an open source deep learning framework. PFN promotes advanced initiatives by collaborating with world leading organizations, such as Toyota Motor Corporation, Fanuc Corporation and the National Cancer Center.

https://www.preferred-networks.jp/

About NTT Communications Corporation

NTT Communications provides consultancy, architecture, security and cloud services to optimize the information and communications technology (ICT) environments of enterprises. These offerings are backed by the company’s worldwide infrastructure, including the leading global tier-1 IP network, the Arcstar Universal One™ VPN network reaching over 190 countries/regions, and over 140 secure data centers worldwide. NTT Communications’ solutions leverage the global resources of NTT Group companies including Dimension Data, NTT DOCOMO and NTT DATA.
www.ntt.com | Twitter@NTT Com | Facebook@NTT Com | LinkedIn@NTT Com

NTT PC Communications Incorporated

NTTPC Communications Incorporated (NTTPC), established in 1985 is a subsidiary of NTT Communications, is a network service and communication solution provider in Japanese telco market, The company has been the most strategic technology company of the group throughout of years. NTTPC launched the 1st ISP service of the NTT group, so called "InfoSphere" at 1995, and also launched the 1st Internet Data Center and server hosting services of Japan so called "WebARENA" at 1997. NTTPC have always started something new in ICT market.