Big Sur: A Closer Look at the Engine Powering Facebook's AI

PRINEVILLE, Ore. – In a row of racks deep inside a massive data center sits the engine of Facebook's ambitions in artificial intelligence. Each server chassis is packed with computing horsepower, including graphics processing units (GPUs) that can crunch enormous volumes of data. This is Big Sur, and it is the key to Facebook's bid to create a smarter newsfeed for its 1.6 billion users around the globe. Using Big Sur, Facebook can train its machine learning systems to recognize speech, understand the content of video and images, and translate content from one language to another. Machine learning holds tremendous promise, but requires a lot of horsepower.