T2 deals help Argonne scientists apply AI to COVID-19 research
NVIDIA on May 14 unveiled NVIDIA DGX™ A100, the third generation of the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) system, with the first order going to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, which will use the cluster’s AI and computing power to better understand and fight COVID-19.
Immediately available, DGX A100 systems have begun shipping worldwide, delivering 5 petaflops of AI performance and consolidating the power and capabilities of an entire data center into a single flexible platform for the first time. A number of the world’s largest companies, service providers and government agencies have placed initial orders for the DGX A100, with the first systems delivered to Argonne earlier this month.
“We’re using America’s most powerful supercomputers in the fight against COVID-19, running AI models and simulations on the latest technology available, like the NVIDIA DGX A100,” said Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences at Argonne. “The compute power of the new DGX A100 systems coming to Argonne will help researchers explore treatments and vaccines and study the spread of the virus, enabling scientists to do years’ worth of AI-accelerated work in months or days.”
Argonne has an existing partnership with Los Altos, California-based AI company Cerebras Systems, initially to explore how deep learning can advance research in cancer, traumatic brain injury and the properties of black holes, amongst other areas, using Cerebras’ industry-leading CS-1 system. In March 2020, the lab pivoted the focus of its AI research to COVID-19. By using the CS-1, ANL can train models hundreds of times faster than before, enabling them to quickly identify which drug molecules will be most effective in binding to the virus’ proteins and keeping the Pandora’s Box of COVID-19 closed.
DGX A100 systems integrate eight of the new NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, providing 320GB of memory for training the largest AI datasets, and the latest high-speed NVIDIA Mellanox® HDR 200Gbps interconnects.
Multiple smaller workloads can be accelerated by partitioning the DGX A100 into as many as 56 instances per system, using the A100 multi-instance GPU feature. Combining these capabilities enables enterprises to optimize computing power and resources on demand to accelerate diverse workloads, including data analytics, training and inference, on a single, fully integrated, software-defined platform.
“NVIDIA DGX A100 is the ultimate instrument for advancing AI,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA. “NVIDIA DGX is the first AI system built for the end-to-end machine learning workflow — from data analytics to training to inference. And with the giant performance leap of the new DGX, machine learning engineers can stay ahead of the exponentially growing size of AI models and data.”
Thousands of previous-generation DGX systems are in use around the globe by a wide range of public and private organizations. Among them are some of the world’s leading businesses, including automakers, healthcare providers, retailers, financial institutions and logistics companies that are pushing AI forward across their industries.
Read more:
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-ships-worlds-most-advanced-ai-...
https://www.cerebras.net/argonne-national-laboratory-and-cerebras-system...