Microsoft launches Project Brainwave for real-time artificial intelligence

Software giant Microsoft has announced its Project Brainwave deep learning acceleration platform for real-time artificial intelligence (AI). With the help of ultra-low latency, the system processes requests as fast as it receives them. "Real-time AI is becoming increasingly important as cloud infrastructures process live data streams, whether they be search queries, videos, sensor streams, or interactions with users," said Doug Burger, an engineer at Microsoft, in a blog post late on Tuesday. The'Project Brainwave' uses the massive field-programmable gate array (FPGA) infrastructure that Microsoft has been deploying over the past few years. "By attaching high-performance FPGAs directly to our datacentre network, we can serve DNNs as hardware microservices, where a DNN can be mapped to a pool of remote FPGAs and called by a server with no software in the loop," Burger said.