The largest computer in the world

It is the largest distributed AI computing pool in the world

In China, there are thousands of data centers distributed throughout a territory, now they are beginning to think as a single machine, according to official reports, China activated the largest distributed AI computing pool in the world, the system called Future Network Test Facility went into operation on December 3 and connects data centers separated by about 2,000 km, making them function almost like a single supercomputer.

The interconnection uses a very high-speed optical network and reaches something rare until now, 98% of the efficiency of a unified data center, in practice it is as if several distant computers were connected by an exclusive data highway, without bottlenecks or delays, this is possible thanks to a deterministic network, where the response time is predictable, different from the common Internet that varies according to traffic, the impact appears in the numbers.

Training a large AI model with hundreds of billions of parameters requires more than 500,000 interactions, in this Chinese network each interaction takes about 16 seconds, without it it would take more than 20 additional seconds per round, enough to delay the entire training by months.

To be used in critical areas

This unified computer is not only designed for real-time applications, such as telemedicine, industrial automation and critical systems, it is also part of the Chinese national strategy to redistribute computing from the east to the west of the country, taking advantage of regions with greater energy availability.

When an entire country begins to function as a single computer, we are facing a technical advance or the beginnings of a new form of digital power.