Facebook is joining Google in open-sourcing its AI hardware

Big Sur, which is contributing to the Open Compute Project, includes eight GPU boards, each consisting of many chips but yet consuming only about 300 Watts of power.

Google uses this kind of AI technique to recognize spoken words, translate from one language to another, improve Internet search results, and other tasks.

Here is where the Facebook AI servers come into play.

Recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence have been driven recently by larger publicly available research data and more powerful computers, specifically powered by GPU.

Big Sur is twice as fast as Facebook's previous-generation AI servers.

Facebook's Kevin Lee and that the open sourced AI hardware more efficient than off-the-shelf options because the servers can be operated within data centers based on Open Compute Project standards.

But both companies have taken a strategic turn recently, open sourcing their AI and Machine Learning efforts in order to crowdsource expertise and accelerate research.

Facebook is giving away for free some hardware designs that make computers smarter and able to learn.

The social media's server design will be submitted by the company to the Open Compute Project, the group they have started, where companies like Apple and Microsoft share their designs of computing infrastructures to help make the cost go down. And the Tesla platform's growing global adoption facilitates open collaboration with researchers around the world, fueling new waves of discovery and innovation in the machine learning field.

Facebook Inc.s use of artificial intelligence, which ranges from tools for image recognition to the filtering of the news feeds for its social network, demands special computing infrastructure.

"But we realised that truly tackling these problems at scale would require us to design our own systems". Components that fail relatively frequently, such as hard drives and DIMMs, can be removed and replaced in seconds.

, the man in charge of group, believes that opening up Big Sur can help unlock design ideas for the newly created server, reports . "The CPU heat sinks are the only things you need a screwdriver for", the company says.

Google is also rolling out machine learning across more of its services.

It's not sharing the design to be altruistic: Facebook hopes others will try out the hardware and suggest improvements.

That's great! But the other key thing is that Facebook the Big Sur design, which means it's passing out the blueprint for how to reproduce this server to anyone who wants to see it. Facebook open sources a lot of technology, so this isn't unprecedented. Facebook designed Big Sur based on Tesla M40 GPU, but it can accommodate other GPUs as well.