NVIDIA unveiled NVIDIA DGX A100, the third generation of its advanced AI system, delivering 5 petaflops of artificial intelligence (AI) performance and consolidating the power and capabilities of an entire data center into a single flexible platform for the first time.
Image credit: NVIDIA
Immediately available, DGX A100 systems have begun shipping worldwide, 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.
“NVIDIA DGX A100 is the ultimate instrument for advancing AI,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of 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.”
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.
“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.”
The University of Florida will be the first institution of higher learning in the U.S. to receive DGX A100 systems, which it will deploy to infuse AI across its entire curriculum to foster an AI-enabled workforce.
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.
NVIDIA also revealed its next-generation DGX SuperPOD, a cluster of 140 DGX A100 systems capable of achieving 700 petaflops of AI computing power. Combining 140 DGX A100 systems with Mellanox HDR 200Gbps InfiniBand interconnects, NVIDIA built the DGX SuperPOD AI supercomputer for internal research in areas such as conversational AI, genomics and autonomous driving.
The cluster is one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers — achieving a level of performance that previously required thousands of servers. The enterprise-ready architecture and performance of the DGX A100 enabled NVIDIA to build the system in less than a month, instead of taking months or years of planning and procurement of specialized components previously required to deliver these supercomputing capabilities.
To help customers build their own A100-powered data centers, NVIDIA has released a new DGX SuperPOD reference architecture. It gives customers a blueprint that follows the same design principles and best practices NVIDIA used to build its DGX A100-based AI supercomputing cluster.
NVIDIA also launched the NVIDIA DGXpert program, which brings together DGX customers with the company’s AI experts; and the NVIDIA DGX-Ready Software program, which helps customers take advantage of certified, enterprise-grade software for AI workflows.