Company taps WEKa’s expertise in architecting autonomous vehicle (AV) structures and handling artificial intelligence (AI) at massive scale
SAN JOSE, Calif. – June 12, 2018 – WEKA, the innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data intensive applications, today announced that TuSimple, a leader in autonomous truck technology, has selected the WEKA Matrix™ HPC storage system to provide flash-based parallel file storage capabilities to accelerate its deep neural network (DNN) machine learning training. Matrix is the fastest, most scalable parallel file system for AI and technical compute workloads.
TuSimple’s goal is to develop a Level 4 autonomous truck driving solution, for the dock-to-dock delivery of commercial goods. The company, which was founded by entrepreneurs from the California Institute of Technology, has facilities in San Diego, Calif. and Tucson, Ariz., and to date its technology has been road-tested for some 15,000 miles. TuSimple chose Weka Matrix after comparisons with other scale-out file systems demonstrated that only Matrix has the ability to meet its most demanding performance requirements.
“Weka Matrix was the clear choice for our on-premises DNN training in the U.S. It was understood from the outset that a standard network-attached storage (NAS) solution would not be able to scale to the extent we would need it to, and apart from Matrix being the most performant of all the parallel file systems we evaluated, we really liked the fact that it is hardware-independent, allowing us better control over our infrastructure costs. We are also taking full advantage of Weka’s object storage capability, which is much more economical than an all-flash system, and allows us to efficiently scale our data catalog in a single namespace,” said Dr. Xiaodi Hou, Co-founder and CTO at TuSimple.
Implementing Weka Matrix positions TuSimple to extract the maximum value from its training systems for autonomous fleet vehicles. Extensive training enables TuSimple’s L4 system to recognize and safely respond, in real-time, to the broad range of objects and conditions a Class 8 truck might encounter while driving autonomously. With Matrix software, both data and metadata are distributed across the entire storage infrastructure to ensure massively parallel access. The software has an optimized network stack, which will deliver low latency and high bandwidth performance, resulting in a solution that can handle the most demanding data and metadata intensive operations.
“We don’t rely on LiDAR as our primary sensor, we do a lot of camera-based analysis,” added Dr. Hou. “The data sets that train our AI models are comprised of millions of image files which need to be read at high bandwidth. Matrix provides the low latency, high bandwidth we need to meet our data ingest demands.”
“TuSimple is a visionary company whose AV technology is unlike anything else currently available,” said Liran Zvibel, Co-founder and CEO at Weka. “We have deep expertise in architecting AI storage infrastructures similar to the TuSimple use case at other AV locations, which has moreover contributed to our understanding of how to handle AI at massive scale. I’m also pleased to say that we are delivering on our promise to keep TuSimple’s GPU cluster fully saturated with data and accelerating its training workloads.”
For more information on how Weka can improve the utilization of GPU resources for AI and machine learning workflows, read the Autonomous Vehicle case study.
About Weka
Weka leapfrogs legacy storage infrastructures and future-proofs datacenters by delivering the world’s fastest parallel file system with the most flexible deployment options—on-premises, cloud, or cloud bursting. Weka Matrix™ software is ideally suited for latency-sensitive business applications at scale such as AI, machine learning, life sciences research, genomics, Big Data analytics, and any data-intensive technical workload.
About TuSimple
Founded in 2015, TuSimple is developing a commercial-ready Level 4 (SAE) autonomous driving solutions for the logistics industry. In 2016, TuSimple broke 10 world records in autonomous driving and ranked No. 1 in KITTI and Cityscapes, the most influential public leaderboard in autonomous driving globally. In 2017, the company entered into supply-chain collaborations with domestic and foreign companies including Shaanxi Automobile Group, NVIDIA, AWS and Peterbilt. For more information, please visit http://www.tusimple.ai/.
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