While Nvidia may be best-known for their popular GeForce line of gaming GPUs, those are far from the only products the company sells. Nvidia’s Quadro GPUs, for example, are geared more towards industrial design and advanced special effects rendering than…
While Nvidia may be best-known for their popular GeForce line of gaming GPUs, those are far from the only products the company sells. Nvidia’s Quadro GPUs, for example, are geared more towards industrial design and advanced special effects rendering than gaming.
Nvidia has also dabbled in the realm of AI processing with their DGX-1 supercomputer. However, it seems one supercomputer offering isn’t enough for Nvidia.
At the GPU Technology Conference on Tuesday, company CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the next evolution of their commercial supercomputer, simply dubbed the DGX-2.
Much like the DGX-1, the DGX-2 is geared towards machine learning and AI research in general. That said, despite being announced a mere 6 months after the DGX-1 officially began shipping out, the DGX-2 is roughly 10 times as fast as its predecessor.
Weighing in at a whopping 350lb, it isn’t hard to see how Nvidia pulled off that speed increase; the DGX-2 is filled to the brim with top-of-the-line hardware. To begin with, the system houses an impressive array of 16 Tesla V100 GPUs spread across two separate GPU boards.
Each V100 contains 32GB of HBM2 memory, adding up to 512GB in total. The system also contains 1.5TB of standard RAM and two Intel Xeon Platinum CPUs. If storage space is your primary concern, the DGX-2 will launch with 30TB of NVME SSD storage by default.
« The extraordinary advances of deep learning only hint at what is still to come, » said Huang. « Many of these advances stand on NVIDIA’s deep learning platform, which has quickly become the world’s standard. We are dramatically enhancing our platform’s performance at a pace far exceeding Moore’s law, enabling breakthroughs that will help revolutionize healthcare, transportation, science exploration and countless other areas. »
Whether or not Nvidia’s lofty ambitions will come to pass remains to be seen but machine learning companies will be able to see for themselves soon enough. If you handle equipment acquisition for such a company and you can stomach its $399,000 price tag, the DGX-2 is available to order right now. The supercomputer is expected to ship out to customers sometime in Q3 2018.
