Alibaba Cloud Unveils Modular Datacenter Architecture to Meet AI Demand

Alibaba Cloud teases new modular datacenter architecture

Also reveals boosted utilization rates, upgraded IaaS and more - all in the name of AI apps Alibaba Cloud has revealed a modular datacenter architecture it claims will help it to satisfy demand for AI infrastructure by improving performance and build times for new facilities. Announced at its annual Apsara conference yesterday, the "CUBE DC 5.0" architecture was described as using "prefabricated modular designs" plus "advanced and proprietary technologies such as wind-liquid hybrid cooling system, all-direct current power distribution architecture and smart management system." Alibaba Cloud hasn't explained those techs in depth, but claims the modular approach reduces deployment times by up to 50 percent compared to traditional datacenter building techniques. The Register has asked Alibaba to explain the workings of a "wind-liquid hybrid cooling system." For what it's worth, machine translation of the term into Mandarin, then fed into search engines, produced results describing cold plate cooling - a technique that sees thin reservoirs of cooled liquids placed on hardware, with cooling achieved by circulating liquid and/or blowing air across the plates. Whatever the term describes, CEO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Eddie Wu told the conference his company "is investing heavily in building an AI infrastructure for the future." "These enhancements are not just about keeping up with AI demands but about setting a global standard for efficiency and sustainability." Other steps towards that goal include a scheduler said to better manage hardware resources so that they achieve up to 90 percent utilization rates. Alibaba Cloud's IaaS offering, the Enterprise Elastic Compute Service (ECS), has reached its ninth generation. Conference attendees were told it is better equipped for AI applications as it has improved recommendation engine speeds by 30 percent and database read/write queries per second by 17 percent. Also at the conference, Alibaba Cloud announced an "Open Lake data utility" that integrates multiple big data engines so they can be used by generative AI applications. Another new offering, "DMS: OneMeta+OneOps," apparently combines and manages metadata from 40 different data sources. It's 2024, so Alibaba Cloud also announced some AI news: the release of its Qwen 2.5 multimodal models, available in sizes from 0.5 to 72 billion parameters, supporting 29 languages and tuned for the needs of sectors including automotive and gaming. The new models are said to have "enhanced knowledge [and] stronger capabilities in math and coding." A text-to-video AI model that works with both Chinese and English prompts, Tongyi Wanxiang, was also released. "The new model is capable of generating high-quality videos in a wide variety of visual styles from realistic scenes to 3D animation," boasted Alibaba Cloud execs. ®

Alibaba says its is ready for AI demand with new modular datacenter architecture

Cloud storage provider Alibaba has introduced its next-generation data center architecture which it says is designed to support rising demand for AI infrastructure globally. CUBE DC 5.0, announced at Alibaba's annual Apsara conference, is a new architecture that's designed to be modular. It can be deployed to improve data center performance, and promises considerable build time reductions as enterprises scale artificial intelligence. According to the Chinese-owned cloud computing company, CUBE DC 5.0 can cut deployment times by up to 50% compared with traditional methods. Alibaba's latest architecture, built around prefabricated modular components, includes technologies like wind-liquid hybrid cooling, an all-direct current power distribution architecture and a smart management system. Full details of the cooling system have not been disclosed, however the wind-liquid hybrid system is believed to integrate liquid cooling plates and airflow in order to optimize hardware cooling.. Eddie Wu, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence CEO, emphasized the significance of the new development in a world where cloud technologies are under increased scrutiny for their energy and resource usage: "These enhancements are not just about keeping up with AI demands but about setting a global standard for efficiency and sustainability." The new CUBE DC 5.0 architecture forms part of the company's broader commitment to advance AI infrastructure, and came alongside other announcements including a new AI Scheduler that promises an impressive 90% efficiency rate. Alibaba also released updates to its Enterprise Elastic Compute Service, now in its ninth generation, including a 30% boost in recommendation engine speed and a 17% increase in database read/write operations. Jingren Zhou, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, added: "We remain committed to investing in advanced AI infrastructure to foster the widespread adoption of generative AI technologies across different industries."