Fudan launches largest cloud computing research platform

Computing for the Future at Fudan (CFFF), the largest ever cloud computing platform established by a Chinese university for science research, was launched in Shanghai on Tuesday.

The supercomputer was jointly built by Fudan University, China Telecom and Alibaba Cloud to discover and solve complex problems in scientific research. It can provide advanced public cloud-based 1,000-GPU parallel intelligent computing services to support large-scale model training with billions of parameters. It's the first of its kind among Chinese universities.

The results of the first scientific large model training based on the CFFF platform were also released. The university trained a large meteorological model with 4.5 billion parameters, which can provide global weather forecasts for the next 15 days as accurate as the European Center For Medium Range Weather Forecasts. And the prediction speed has been shortened from hours to less than 3 seconds.

According to Fudan, CFFF will include two parts, namely Qiewen-1 and Jinsi-1. "Qiewen" and "Jinsi" are from the university's motto. The former means questioning or inquiring, and the latter means thinking and reflecting.

Jin Li, president of Fudan and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the platform will become a great supporting force for scientific research, greatly enhance efficiency while reducing costs, accelerating discoveries of scientific theories and technological breakthroughs, and promoting development of large models.

Meanwhile, the university launched the first World AI for Science Competition on Tuesday. It's expected to attract more than 5,000 research teams from all over the world to compete in any of the five channels – life sciences, atmospheric sciences, material science, hydromechanics and quantum mechanics.