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SK Telecom adopts Xilinx Alveo cards

by on05 November 2019


Datacenter Accelerator against theft

Xilinx and SK Telecom announced that SK Telecom had adopted Xilinx Alveo Datacenter Accelerator cards. The cards have an important job to power a real-time AI-based physical intrusion and theft detection service.

SK Telecom’s AI inference accelerator implemented on Xilinx® Alveo Datacenter Accelerator cards cards provides efficient and accurate physical intrusion detection using deep neural networks. Of course, these days, most innovative products are using machine learning or artificial intelligence to solve some tough tasks.

South Korea’s second-largest physical security company, ADT CAPS CO. LTD, licenses and commercially deploys the physical intrusion detection service.

SK Telecom’s AI-based physical intrusion detection service named T viewTM monitors hundreds of thousands of customers’ commercial and home camera systems in real-time and dispatches security guards under physical intrusion circumstances.

A large volume of data on Neural Network

The task is comprehensive as Xilinx Alveo powered cards have to process a large volume of data from thousands of cameras using deep neural networks. Such a task necessitates a powerful AI accelerator that can provide enough throughput and accuracy.

T view uses SK Telecom’s AI inference accelerator (AIX), implemented on Xilinx Alveo U250 cards. Running on servers in SK Telecom’s data center, Alveo U250 cards have demonstrated high throughput and accuracy in theft detection services. The cards deliver lower detection latency and have achieved superior throughput (frames per second) compared to leading GPUs (read Nvidia Tesla) and have proven to be more cost-effective. The improved throughput and accuracy delivered by Alveo cards mean more customers will have access to real-time, AI-based security services and more reliable protection against security threats.

“In the era of Artificial Intelligence where new services are being deployed at unprecedented rates, we keep pursuing to innovate our cloud systems to deliver more value to our customers with more reliable and efficient services across diverse segments,” said Park Jin-hyo, Chief Technology Officer and Head of ICT R&D Center of SK Telecom. “AIX in collaboration with Xilinx represents one of our efforts to streamline the cloud system for AI services.

Xilinx Alveo accelerator cards are designed to meet the performance and flexibility needs of data center AI workloads, providing 10X higher performance for AI-based speech translation and over 3X higher throughput for video analytics pipelines compared to GPUs. The comparison is based on Transformer NMT (symbols/sec) benchmark of Nvidia Tesla T4 GPU versus Alveo U50 card.

Alveo can adapt and change algorithms

Built on the Xilinx 16nm UltraScale+™ architecture, Alveo accelerators are adaptable to changing algorithms and acceleration requirements, enabling domain-specific architectures that optimize performance for a range of workloads without changing hardware, and while reducing overall cost of ownership. Adaptability and lower TCO (total cost of ownership) are some of the key advantages of the Alveo cards versus the GPU dominant competition, and the second very important one is the low latency on Alveo cards versus any GPU solution.

The commercial deployment of Xilinx Alveo cards in SK Telecom’s data center for AI services builds upon the announcement and success of SK Telecom’s automated speech-recognition (ASR) application powered by Xilinx FPGAs to accelerate NUGU, a voice-activated assistant.

“This represents an important win in the commercial AI services space and builds upon our collaboration with SK Telecom to significantly improve theft detection and prevention, where our leadership in real-time compute and analysis helps to promote AI-based services to the South Korea market,” said Donna Yasay, vice president of marketing, Data Center Group, at Xilinx. “The adaptability, low latency, and high throughput delivered by our Alveo accelerators makes them ideally suited for the visual AI inference workloads in the T view service.”

SK Telecom’s AIX accelerator, implemented on the Alveo U250, and the T view service are currently available in South Korea and are expected to be available globally in fall 2020. The T view is also expected to be commercially available as a rebranded solution from other SK Telecom licensed companies.



Last modified on 05 November 2019
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