Nvidia's Game-Changing Entry into the Supercomputing Showdown. Two Petascale Superchips and a Supercomputer at ISC Hamburg
Nvidia is throwing the glove at Intel and AMD. The leading manufacturer of graphic cards unveiled computer chips that can achieve petascale performance. Nvidia’s two chips called Grace and Grace Hopper were unveiled during the opening day of the ISC 2023 conference in Hamburg.
The company revealed they are working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to develop a cutting-edge European supercomputer called Isambard 3. The machine is powered exclusively by Nvidia's groundbreaking Grace CPU Superchips and will deliver about 2.7 petaflops of FP64 at peak performance. This highly anticipated supercomputer will be situated in the United Kingdom. It will power research in four British universities: the University of Bath, the University of Bristol, Cardiff University, and the University of Exeter. The computing system will propel developments in climate science, artificial intelligence (AI), life sciences, medicine, astrophysics, biotechnology, and energy. Nvidia specifically highlighted the ongoing research endeavors on Isambard 2 into Parkinson's disease, osteoporosis, and the Covid pandemic.
According to Nvidia, the upcoming Isambard 3 is a powerhouse in terms of performance, but also efficiency, with consumption of less than 270 kilowatts. This places Isambard in the world’s top 3 sustainable supercomputers.
“As climate change becomes an increasingly existential problem, it’s vital for computing to embrace energy-efficient technologies,” commented Ian Buck, vice president of Hyperscale and HPC at Nvidia. “Nvidia is working alongside the Arm Neoverse ecosystem to provide a path forward for the creation of more energy-efficient supercomputing centers, driving important breakthroughs in scientific and industrial research.”
The Implications of the Race for Chips With Petascale Performance Between Nvidia, Intel, and AMD
The three giants are now in fierce competition to develop large supercomputer chips to meet the escalating demands of large-scale Artificial Intelligence models. As AIs continue to advance and expand across industries, it needs more powerful computational resources. Chip producers recognize there is huge market value associated with powering the next generation of supercomputers. They have invested significant resources into research and development in order to outperform one another.
The Chips industry is the industry that powers every other modern industry. Petascale performance has profound implications for various fields of research and industry. To put Petascale performance into perspective, it is a thousand times more powerful than the previous milestone, terascale performance (10^12 FLOPS). Petascale performance means the system is now capable to perform one quadrillion calculations per second, or 10^15 floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). It represents an immense level of computational power and is a significant milestone in the field of high-performance computing.
Tasks that would have taken months or even years to complete can now be accomplished in significantly shorter timeframes. This opens up new possibilities for rapid experimentation. It enables scientists and researchers to tackle complex problems, such as climate modeling, molecular dynamics simulations, astrophysics simulations, and drug discovery. With petascale computing, researchers can perform simulations and analysis at a level of detail and accuracy that wasn’t possible before.
Isambard 3 is planned to go into production in spring 2024 and is just one of several, as the company is ramping up Superchips production. Switzerland, the US, and Saudi Arabia will debut supercomputers with Grace Hopper under the hood.