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In Brief If you’re wondering what it takes to develop a self-driving car, know that Tesla is using a 1.8-exaFLOP AI supercomputer packed with 5,760 GPUs that train neural networks it hopes one day will power autonomous vehicles. The machine was described by the automaker’s senior director of AI, Andrej Karpathy, during an online academic computer vision conference this week. It is used to develop Tesla’s super-cruise-control system Autopilot, and also what could be a fully self-driving system when finished. Tesla has been chasing the autonomous vehicle dream for years; the tech has so far proved elusive. “This is a really incredible supercomputer,” Karpathy said. “I actually believe that in terms of FLOPS, this is roughly the number five supercomputer in the world. » It should be noted the prowess of a supercomputers are typically measured in FP64 precision. It’s not clear what precision Tesla’s 1.8 exaFLOPs of compute is running at. It has 780 compute nodes, each containing up to eight Nvidia A100 80GB GPUs.
