Artificial intelligence (AI) is now indispensable as a tool for cutting-edge research. In addition to algorithms, specialized hardware is becoming an increasingly important factor for successful application, whether in energy research or in the development of new materials. The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has now become the first location in Europe to put the new NVIDIA DGX A100 AI system into operation.
Many projects require extremely high computing power and conventional computer systems quickly reach their limits when training an AI with large data sets. The Steinbuch Center for Computing (SCC) at KIT has therefore taken advantage of the procurement for the Karlsruhe high-performance computer (HoreKa) currently under construction at the SCC and has entered into a partnership with the market leader NVIDIA in order to be the first location in Europe to gain access to the company's currently most modern AI systems. The three DGX A100 computer systems that have now been installed are high-performance servers, each with eight NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. Together, the eight accelerators deliver a computing performance of 5 AI petaFLOP/s, i.e. five quadrillion computing operations per second. Compared to the fastest predecessor model to date, the NVIDIA V100, this is an acceleration by a factor of five. At the same time, the new accelerators have been equipped with significantly larger and faster main memory and the throughput of the special NVLink network between the individual chips has been increased to 600 gigabits per second. The researchers are now able to train significantly larger neural networks than before in a much shorter time with even larger amounts of data.
