BERLIN, July 28 (Xinhua) — German automotive supplier Continental set up a supercomputer for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to accelerate the development of innovative mobility technologies, the company announced on Tuesday.
"AI enhances advanced driver assistance systems, makes mobility smarter and safer and accelerates the development of systems for autonomous driving," the firm noted.
The supercomputer, which was among the 500 most powerful computers in the world, was operating from a data center in Frankfurt am Main in Germany since the beginning of the year and used technology from the U.S. company NVIDIA, according to Continental.
"The supercomputer is an investment in our future," said Christian Schumacher, head of program management systems in Continental's advanced driver assistance systems business unit.
Continental's fleet of test cars was currently traveling around 15,000 kilometers per day, generating around 100 terabytes of data, equivalent to 50,000 hours of movies, the German company noted.
"The state-of-the-art system reduces the time to train neural networks, as it allows for at least 14 times more experiments to be run at the same time," added Schumacher.
One task of the supercomputer was to evaluate the data collected by the test cars. According to Continental, the information was used to train a neural network that would in future mimic the way the human brain works to "assist a driver or even operate a vehicle autonomously."