Compute engine makers can do all they want to bring the performance of their devices on par or even reasonably close to that of Nvidia’s various GPU accelerators, but until they have something akin to the NVLink and NVSwitch memory fabric that Nvidia uses to leverage the performance of many GPUs at bandwidths that dwarf PCI-Express switches and latencies that dwarf Ethernet interconnects, they can never catch up. …
The generative AI revolution is making strange bedfellows, as revolutions and emerging monopolies that capitalize on them often do. …
Since the advent of distributed computing, there has been a tension between the tight coherency of memory and its compute within a node – the base level of a unit of compute – and the looser coherency over the network across those nodes. …
Normally, when we look at a system, we think from the compute engines at a very fine detail and then work our way out across the intricacies of the nodes and then the interconnect and software stack that scales it across the nodes into a distributed computing platform. …
At the GPU Technology Conference last week, we told you all about the new NVSwitch memory fabric interconnect that Nvidia has created to link multiple “Volta” GPUs together and that is at the heart of the DGX-2 system that the company has created to demonstrate its capabilities and to use on its internal Saturn V supercomputer at some point in the future. …
All things being equal, you probably would not build a 5 gigawatt datacenter on Earth in the desert near the equator. …
There are many reasons why Nvidia is the hardware juggernaut of the AI revolution, and one of them, without question, is the NVLink memory sharing port that started out on its “Pascal” P100 GOU accelerators way back in 2016. …
The oil barons of the Middle East have been trying to diversify out of carbon fuels and into other parts of the global economy for decades, but artificial intelligence may be a game that only hyperscalers, cloud builders, and Middle East sovereign wealth funds can play at the highest levels and maybe, in the long run, only the latter can tilt the AI playing field to their advantage. …
Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang did not do his OEM and ODM partners, who are the company’s main route to bring the infrastructure underpinning GPU systems to market, any favors when he suggested its “Hopper” GPU platforms would be blown away by their “Blackwell” kickers. …
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