Nvidia and Microsoft have announced that they are collaborating on a new cloud-based artificial intelligence-driven supercomputer that they claim will be “one of the most powerful in the world” when completed. The new supercomputer will leverage Microsoft Azure’s supercomputing infrastructure. Nvidia GPUs will be combined with networking and artificial intelligence software. AI is set to include ND and NC series virtual machines specifically designed for distributed training and inference.
Nvidia and Microsoft claim that the project represents the first public cloud to include NVIDIA’s full AI stack and will include tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs, NVIDIA Quantum-2 400Gb/s InfiniBand networks, and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite.
How will it be used?
The firms said the new machine will be used to help businesses train, deploy and scale artificial intelligence, including large models. Nvidia is also preparing to use Azure’s scalable virtual machine instances to research and further advance in productive AI. This is an emerging field of artificial intelligence where core models such as the Megatron Turing NLG 530B provide the basis for unsupervised, self-learning algorithms to generate new text, code, digital images, video or audio.
The companies will also collaborate to optimize Microsoft’s DeepSpeed deep optimization software, and Nvidia’s full stack of AI workflows and Azure-optimized software development kits will be made available to Azure enterprise customers.
“Advances in AI technology and industry adoption are accelerating,” said Manuvir Das, vice president of enterprise computing at Nvidia. “The groundbreaking foundational models have triggered a huge wave of research, spurred new initiatives and enabled new enterprise applications.”
Microsoft isn’t the only company collaborating with Nvidia to roll out the latest AI innovations. Oracle and Nvidia announced a collaboration at Oracle Cloud World 2022. It will include tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs, such as the A100 and the upcoming H100, which support Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
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