Artificial intelligence (AI) chip maker Habana Labs has announced San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) selected it to provide high-performance inference accelerators and AI training for its Voyager supercomputer.
SDSC’s Voyager, scheduled for release in fall 2021, is earmarked for advancing AI research across a range of science and engineering domains.
"We are honored that Habana's AI processors have been selected to power the AI workloads that will run on San Diego Supercomputer Center's Voyager supercomputer," said Eitan Medina, chief business officer at Habana.
"This implementation of our Gaudi and Goya products showcases how top academic institutions like SDSC can harness efficiency and performance to effectively address the growing demands of AI research workloads."
As part of their deal, SDSC will leverage Habana's interconnect technology to efficiently scale Voyager’s AI training capacity through 336 Gaudi processors. Habana’s Gaudi AI training processors are reportedly the industry's only AI processors that natively integrate ten 100-Gigabit Ethernet ports of RoCE v2 (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) on-chip. The Voyager system will also feature 16 Habana Goya processors to power AI inference models.
Additionally, Habana’s Gaudi AI training and Goya inference processors will enable data scientists and researchers to customize AI models with programmable Tensor Processor Cores and kernel libraries. The models will be implemented through Habana's SynapseAI software platform, which supports popular machine learning frameworks and AI models for applications such as vision, natural language processing, and recommendation systems.
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According to reports, advanced server solutions provider Supermicro will provide Habana-based AI systems to SDSC for Voyage.
“Combining Supermicro's advanced application-optimized server and storage hardware with Habana's AI training and inference products is the best solution for SDSC's multi-year Voyager AI project," said Ray Pang, vice president of technology and business enablement at Supermicro.
"We continue to work closely with leading innovators to deliver solutions for computationally intensive projects worldwide at leading research and HPC environments for science and medical discovery, compute, and leading-edge AI solutions."
