From Tom's Hardware, August 28:
Tesla is about to flip the switch on its new AI cluster, featuring 10,000 Nvidia H100 compute GPUs.
Tesla is set to launch its highly-anticipated supercomputer on Monday, according to @SawyerMerritt. The machine will be used for various artificial intelligence (AI) applications, but the cluster is so powerful that it could also be used for demanding high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. In fact, the Nvidia H100-based supercomputer will be one of the most powerful machines in the world.
Tesla's new cluster will employ 10,000 Nvidia H100 compute GPUs, which will offer a peak performance of 340 FP64 PFLOPS for technical computing and 39.58 INT8 ExaFLOPS for AI applications. In fact, Tesla’s 340 FP64 PFLOPS is higher than 304 FP64 PFLOPS offered by Leonardo, the world’s fourth highest-performing supercomputer.
With its new supercomputer, Tesla is significantly enhancing its computing capabilities to train its full self-driving (FSD) technology faster than ever. This could not only make Tesla more competitive than other automakers but will make the company the owner of one of the world's fastest supercomputers.
"Due to real-world video training, we may have the largest training datasets in the world, hot tier cache capacity beyond 200PB — orders of magnitudes more than LLMs," explained Tim Zaman, AI Infra & AI Platform Engineering Manager at Tesla....
....MUCH MORE
HT: HPC [high performance computing] Wire, August 29:
"Tesla Launches New $300M AI Cluster for Advanced Computation"
Previously:
July 20
Before we get to the headline story, some background. Tesla and Nvidia have a history.
In 2015 - 2016 when everyone thought that autonomous driving was just around the corner, the challenge was seen as both a sensor issue, for example: LIDAR vs cameras, and a machine learning/artificial intelligence problem which boils down to training the AI 'puters with as much data as you can so that out in the real world the autonomous vehicle can say to itself: "Yeah, I've seen this situation before, here's the response that worked best. Both the training and the on-the-road-recall, if they are to be anywhere near efficient, require the fastest chips you can find. Tesla had a whole bunch of data from a few billion miles of actual driving for computers to train on, and, combined with Nvidia's fastest-in-the-world GPU chips, it was a match made in heaven.
Except it wasn't.
The challenge of autonomous driving on open roads alongside non-autonomous vehicles was bigger than anyone in that simple, optimistic time ever envisioned, even in their nightmares. Here's one example about Waymo from a 2017 post:
"When Google was training its self-driving car on the streets of Mountain View, California, the car rounded a corner and encountered a woman in a wheelchair, waving a broom, chasing a duck. The car hadn’t encountered this before so it stopped and waited."
In May 2015 we were posting " Nvidia Wants to Be the Brains Of Your Autonomous Car (NVDA)" and seven months later the more declarative "Class Act: Nvidia Will Be The Brains Of Your Autonomous Car (NVDA)"
Then in October 2016, what was probably the high-water mark for the relationship "Nvidia Could Make $1B From Tesla's Self-Driving Decree: Analyst (TSLA, NVDA)"
Sadly, the task was just too difficult but Mr. Musk thought it was doable if only he could get even faster chips than Nvidia had on offer:
NVIDIA Partner Tesla Reportedly Developing Chip With AMD (TSLA; NVDA; AMD)
Today in leveraged WTFs....
The only reason for Tesla to do this is that NVIDIA's chips are general purpose whereas specialized chips are making inroads in stuff like crypto mining (ASICs), Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for machine learning and Facebook's hardware efforts.
We've said NVIDIA probably has a couple year head start but this bears watching, so to speak....
Culminating in August 2018's
"Nvidia CEO is 'more than happy to help' if Tesla's A.I. chip doesn't pan out" (NVDA; TSLA)
And possibly related July 13:
Elon Musk's x.AI Launches
The company was formed in March so it's valuation is probably around a hundred billion or so.
Just
kidding. I have no idea what sort of valuation it has been assigned.
x.AI is a Nevada corporation which, as our corporate attorney readers
well know, is handy as hell for a privately-held stealth company. As
part of the company's coming-out I think they dropped the period in the
name on the original incorporation papers.
Mr. Musk was one of the founder/funders ($100 million gift not equity) of ChatGPT parent OpenAI when it was a .org (non-profit) and seemed a bit miffed when Sam Alman hooked up with Microsoft to the tune of $10 billion.
So Elon went out and bought a garage-full of GPUs.
Here's a twofer, first up TechCrunch, July 12:....
