VinAI pioneers in upgrading and innovating in Southeast Asia with powerful supercomputers in Vietnam

This supercomputer serves the initiatives of the VinAI Institute for Intellectual Research (under the Vingroup Group), applying for self-propelled electric vehicles, health care to services for consumers … not only in Vietnam but also in Vietnam. also global.

New star on the AI ​​Map

One of VinAI’s important missions is to develop artificial intelligence for VinFast’s upcoming self-propelled smart electric cars, Vingroup’s car brand, to realize the goal of exporting cars to markets. global school.

This is a big challenge for Dr. Bui Hai Hung, the head of VinAI and colleagues. As a leading AI researcher with nearly 6,000 citations from more than 200 articles, Mr. Hung also won a Gold Medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad when he was young, he was ready for this challenge.

In 2 years, Dr. Bui Hai Hung has built a team of 200 AI researchers and engineers at VinAI.

In just two years, Dr. Bui Hai Hung built a team of 200 AI researchers and engineers. Last year, he and his team announced more than 20 studies at the world’s leading AI conferences, widening the boundaries of AI research and simultaneously enhancing the transfer of AI technology into many products. by Vingroup

“By July we will have a fleet of 24/7 crawl vehicles, on real-world roads of millions of miles in the US and Europe. This is just the beginning, the volume of data. will only increase, “shared Dr. Hung. The team will exploit data to design and refine at least more than ten AI models to support level 3 automatic driving for VinFast’s electric cars.

DGX SuperPOD – the driving force behind

Dr. Hung predicts the need to retrain AI models daily when new data is available. He believes that the DGX SuperPOD can be up to 10 times faster to process the AI ​​workloads of the NVIDIA DGX A100 system that VinAI currently uses, allowing engineers to update their models every 24 hours.

“That is the goal towards, we will save a lot of time. We will need a lot of help from NVIDIA,” he said and hopes that by May 2021 there will be a cluster of 20 new DGX A100 systems. linked together with the NVIDIA Mellanox HDR Network InfiniBand 200Gb / s.

Train world-class talents

With the DGX SuperPOD supercomputer, Dr. Bui Hai Hung hopes to attract and develop more world-class AI talents in Vietnam.

In October, the company held a ceremony marking the end of the first school year for the first 260 students at VinUniversity. This is the first private and non-profit university in Vietnam, founded and fully funded by Vingroup, and currently offers training programs in business, engineering, computer science and faculty. health school.

With the DGX SuperPOD supercomputer, Dr. Bui Hai Hung hopes to develop more world-class AI talents in Vietnam.

This is also a sign of a better future, like the Landmark81 (photo above) – an 81-storey skyscraper that Vingroup has built and operated on the banks of the Saigon River. Director of VinAI said: “AI technology is a way to bring the company to develop and make a lot of impacts on the lives of people in Vietnam.” Mr. Hung also noted that other departments in the group also use the DGX system to promote diagnosis and medical imaging.

A better life with AI technology

Dr. Hung is also a person who has witnessed with his own eyes the positive effects of artificial intelligence. His early work in the field at SRI International in Menlo Park, California, helped create the Siri assistant technology in Apple’s iPhone.

Recently, VinAI has developed a technology that allows users of VinSmart handheld mobile devices to unlock phones with facial recognition – even while wearing a COVID prevention mask. At the same time, the core AI researchers at VinAI developed Pho-BERT, a Vietnamese version of the giant Transformer model used for natural language processing.

These are world-class projects that two years ago, President of Vingroup – Vietnam’s first billionaire, Mr. Pham Nhat Vuong wanted from VinAI.

Mr. Vuong was also the one who persuaded Dr. Bui Hai Hung to leave the position of research scientist in Google’s DeepMind group.

Orienting the future of AI

Last year, to strengthen capacity, VinAI became the first company in Southeast Asia to install the DGX A100 system.

“We have quite successfully used NVIDIA’s new hardware and software in speech recognition, natural language processing, and computer vision. Now, we are taking our work to new heights. with awareness system for autonomous vehicles, “said Dr. Hung.

It is a challenge given the rising wave of pedestrians, bicycles, scooters and cars on the way to the office in Hanoi. “When I go back to Vietnam, I have to learn how to drive in traffic conditions which are very different from those in the US,” said Dr. Hung. “After a while, I understood it, but I think a machine will probably do even better. Driving conditions like in Vietnam are a huge technological challenge to any self-driving system. No action on the way to level 5 self-propelled “.

* Source: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/04/19/ai-superpod-vinai/