Nvidia Will Be A Prime Contractor For Big AI Supercomputers

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. But this time, when we are going over the many announcements that Nvidia is making at its GPU Technical Conference 2022 online event, we want to start at the middle layer where the nodes meet the network and work our way up because this is what makes Nvidia a real contender as a high performance computing system maker – meaning machines designed to run AI, HPC, data analytics workloads and not just traditional HPC simulation and modeling. In fact, we think the innovations unleashed at GTC 2022 this year are going to make Nvidia one of the key prime contractors for such systems operating at exascale and beyond. To play that game, you have to have architecture and deep pockets, and Nvidia clearly has both. With IBM basically out of the game, capability-class supercomputers are coming down to Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Nvidia, Fujitsu (the latter being pretty much focused on RIKEN Lab in Japan and a few other centers that buy chips off the "K" and "Fugaku" blocks), and Atos (which is doing a lot of business with its BullSequana systems in Europe).