Today, artificial intelligence, as the core driving force of a new round of scientific and technological revolution, is having a profound impact on the global economy, social progress and human life. As China vigorously develops “new infrastructure,” new-technology infrastructure represented by AI has entered a high-profile moment. Sugon built a highly compatible, high-performance AI platform for the School of Artificial Intelligence at Beijing Normal University, so that modern technology permeates the school’s teaching and research and it firmly grasps the core driving force of industrial change.

Rooted in a century-old university’s information-science soil, vigorously driving new-technology industry

As a Double First-Class university with a century of history, Beijing Normal University’s information discipline is rooted in that soil and has abundant scientific achievements in the information industry.

In recent years, in response to the national strategy, to vigorously drive new-technology industry and to cultivate high-end technical talent, Beijing Normal University established the School of Artificial Intelligence. The school is continually increasing related research, placing still stricter requirements on the computing platform that supports its research and teaching.

On one hand, the school has two provincial- and ministry-level key research units—the Engineering Research Center of Virtual Reality Application of the Ministry of Education, and the Beijing Key Laboratory of Digital Protection of Cultural Heritage and Virtual Reality—and six university-level key laboratories. Research data volumes are growing, creating huge demand for high-end computing power.

On the other hand, AI has developed rapidly over the past decade, but for university teaching it is still a young discipline. The industry lacks experience in building AI teaching and research platforms, so performance and compatibility of the computing platform are especially important for research and teaching.

Sugon provides an integrated solution, successfully setting a benchmark AI platform for teacher-training universities

Sugon provided the school with an integrated, full-lifecycle solution with good system compatibility; through tailored design, it also meets different research-scenario needs. The system is based on Sugon Tiankuo series X795-G30 servers and a high-performance storage system, together with the Sugon SothisAI artificial-intelligence management platform, achieving overall efficiency, stability, scalability and ease of use.

Among them, the Sugon Tiankuo series X795-G30 server has strong performance and can support internal interconnect bandwidth of up to 300 GB/s, providing a higher speedup for computing. It is a dedicated training platform for deep learning.

The Sugon SothisAI artificial-intelligence management platform provides a one-stop deep-learning solution, helping customers with multi-user-group resource allocation, rapid setup of development environments and flexible migration of applications, covering the full online deep-learning application workflow.

Once built, the system can also connect to computing-center resources in various regions, providing compute resources and application services to faculty and students of other schools, further gathering top research and industrial-innovation resources in high-end computing and AI at home and abroad, and accelerating research development of a new-technology industry centered on AI and computing services.

This collaboration between Sugon and Beijing Normal University has successfully set a benchmark AI platform for teacher-training universities. In the future the solution will be applied in more universities, and Sugon will increase product R&D to continue driving the development of university AI.