ByteDance’s Volcano Engine Releases Large Model Training Cloud Platform

On April 18th, ByteDance’s subsidiary, the Volcano Engine, released a series of self-developed cloud products including DPU and launched a new version of its machine learning platform.

The new platform supports large-scale model training with tens of thousands of cards and microsecond-level latency networks to make large model training more stable and faster.

Among them, the Volcano Engine’s new generation of self-developed DPU networks has a high forwarding capacity of up to 50 million packets per second and low latency as low as 20 microseconds.

Various computing instances based on self-developed DPUs also have significant performance improvements, such as GPU instances suitable for large-scale distributed parallel training scenarios, which have increased their cluster performance by more than three times compared to the previous generation.

Tan Dai, the CEO of Volcano Engine, stated that there are dozens of companies in China that specialize in large models, and most of them are already on the Volcano Engine cloud. Unlike other cloud vendors who promote their own large models, Volcano Engine will collaborate with multiple large model providers to offer more diverse AI applications for businesses and consumers.

Tan Dai said that the goal of Volcano Engine is to provide high stability and cost-effectiveness AI infrastructure for large-scale model customers.

Meanwhile, Volcano Engine announced its partnership with ByteDance’s domestic business. The offline business resources can be scheduled at a minute-level with 100,000 core CPUs, while the online business resources can also be flexibly reused during peak hours. The price of preemptible instances for elastic computing can be discounted by more than 80%.

SEE ALSO: ByteDance’s Douyin Collaborates with Sanxingdui Museum

Taking the recommendation system of ByteDance’s Douyin as an example, engineers trained a certain model with 15 months of samples. The training can be completed in just 5 hours and costs only ¥5000 RMB (about $730 USD). The popular “AI painting” special effect on Douyin was launched online in just over a week, and the model was trained by an algorithm engineer.

According to reports, the Volcano Engine will provide unified products both internally and externally. Apps such as ByteDance’s Douyin and Toutiao have added “Volcano Engine provides computing services” to their splash screens.