Tag: supercomputer
Google dives into the ‘supercomputer’ game by knitting together purpose-built GPUs for large language model training
Google Says Its AI Supercomputer is Faster, Greener Than Nvidia A100 Chip
Improving these connections has become a key point of competition among companies that build AI supercomputers because so-called large language models that power technologies like Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT have exploded in size, meaning they are far too large to store on a single chip. The models must instead be split across thousands of chips, which must then work together for weeks or more to train the model. Google’s PaLM model – its largest publicly disclosed language model to date – was trained by splitting it across two of the 4,000-chip supercomputers over 50 days.
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UK government pledges £900 million to build “BritGPT” exascale supercomputer to advance AI technology
The UK has announced plans to invest £900 million ($1.1 billion US) in a new supercomputer to create its own GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) AI model. Tentatively dubbed “BritGPT,” it will be one of the world’s most powerful computing devices, capable of performing over one billion billion simple calculations per…
IBM Says It’s Been Running a Cloud-Native, AI-Optimized Supercomputer Since May
The system known as Vela, which the company claims has been online since May last year, is touted as IBM’s first AI-optimized, cloud-native supercomputer, created with the aim of developing and training large-scale AI models. Before anyone rushes off to sign up for access, IBM stated that the platform is currently reserved for use by the IBM Research community. In fact, Vela has become the company’s “go-to environment” for researchers creating advanced AI capabilities since May 2022, including work on foundation models, it said.
IBM states that it chose this architecture because it gives the company greater flexibility to scale up as required, and also the ability to deploy similar infrastructure into any IBM Cloud datacenter around the globe. But Vela is not running on any old standard IBM Cloud node hardware; each is a twin-socket system with 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable processors configured with 1.5TB of DRAM, and four 3.2TB NVMe flash drives, plus eight 80GB Nvidia A100 GPUs, the latter connected by NVLink and NVSwitch. This makes the Vela infrastructure closer to that of a high performance compute site than typical cloud infrastructure, despite IBM’s insistence that it was taking a different path as “traditional supercomputers weren’t designed for AI.”
It is also notable that IBM chose to use x86 processors rather than its own Power 10 chips, especially as these were touted by Big Blue as being ideally suited for memory-intensive workloads such as large-model AI inferencing.
Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the story.
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Supercomputer Re-Creates One of the Most Famous Pictures of Earth
To re-create the swirling winds of the Blue Marble — including a cyclone over the Indian Ocean — the researchers fed weather records from 1972 into the supercomputer-powered software. The resulting world captured distinctive features of the region, such as upwelling waters off the coast of Namibia and long, reedlike cloud coverage. Experts say the stunt highlights the growing sophistication of high-resolution climate models. Those are expected to form the core of the European Union’s Destination Earth project, which aims to create a ‘digital twin’ of Earth to better forecast extreme weather and guide preparation plans.
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Nvidia and Microsoft working to bring a GPU-based, AI supercomputer to the cloud
Generative AI models prove helpful for many applications. Machine learning algorithms can create uncanny imagery or predict source code from the future, often negatively swaying public opinion with their “in-the-wrong-hands” capabilities. A new partnership between two of the biggest tech companies out there is promising to accelerate these capabilities, creating…
Best of both: Finland connects supercomputer to quantum computer
Researchers believe that by working together, quantum computers and traditional high-performance computers could tackle problems that neither machine can solve alone.
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