California-based computer processor maker Nvidia on Monday unveiled plans to develop the world’s fastest AI supercomputer, and it plans to do so in Israel.
Nvidia operates a large research and development center in Tel Aviv. Many of the world’s top tech companies, like Intel and Microsoft, have R&D centers in the Jewish state to tap into Israeli ingenuity.
The new supercomputer will be called the “Israel-1” and will deliver up to 8 exaflops of peak AI performance, making it one of the fastest AI supercomputers ever built.
Speaking at the Computex 2023 conference in Taiwan this week, Nvidia’s senior vice president of HPC (high-performance computing) and networking, Gilad Shainer said: “Israel-1 represents a major investment that will help us drive innovation in Israel and globally.”
For those interested in the tech specs, the Israel-1 will feature:
- 256 HGX H100 GPU (graphics processing unit) systems supplied by Dell Technologies
- 2,048 Nvidia H100 80GB GPUs
- More than 34 million CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) cores (central processing units, i.e. CPUs)
- Over 1 million fourth-generation Tensor cores
- 2,560 BlueField-3 DPUs (data processing units); and
- 80 Spectrum-4 switches.
