Govt launches first shared GPU cloud facility to boost AI, research

Bangladesh has launched its first government-run, shareable cloud computing facility powered by high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs), aiming to accelerate higher education, research and machine learning-based skill development.

GPUs are specialised processors designed to handle massive parallel calculations and are particularly efficient for artificial intelligence and deep learning tasks, compared with traditional central processing units used in most computers.

In a Facebook post today, Faiz Ahmad Taiyeb, special assistant to the chief adviser at the Ministry of Posts, Telecommunication and Information Technology, said the Bangladesh Hi-Tech Park Authority (BHTPA) has integrated more than 20 NVIDIA Volta Architecture Tensor Core GPUs into a cloud resource management platform and made the facility operational.

He described it as the first such shared cloud facility in the public sector.

According to the post, the infrastructure will be maintained by the National Data Centre team of the Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC).

The platform is expected to support a wide range of high-performance computing (HPC) activities, including machine learning-based dataset training, threat intelligence analysis and geoscience modelling.

Based on specifications, one GPU can deliver computing power equivalent to around 45 CPUs, giving the platform a combined capability of more than 900 CPU-equivalent computation, the post said.

Overall, the shared cloud is capable of offering up to 2,240 teraFLOPS of deep learning capacity.

A teraFLOPS is a unit that measures computing speed and refers to one trillion floating-point calculations per second, commonly used to describe AI and supercomputing performance.

The facility will allow users to run small-scale AI model simulations, train models and conduct inference tests, processes used to evaluate how a trained AI model performs on new data.

Interested individuals, organisations, universities and research institutions have been asked to express their interest by emailing datacenter@bcc.gov.bd, according to the post.