NVIDIA opens up AI to the enterprise with DGX SuperPOD supercomputer

NVIDIA's newest supercomputer is being called the 'world's first' supercomputer designed specifically for the booming artificial intelligence (AI) market, unveiled at NVIDIA GTC this week.

"NVIDIA designed the new DGX SuperPOD to meet customers' growing security and scalability requirements as AI broadens in adoption," the company explains.

"Increasingly, enterprise IT departments need to support the work of multiple teams at different locations, while academic and research institutions often grant outside organisations access to their computing resources.

The NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD is a type of cloud-native multi-tenant AI supercomputer that features 20+ NVIDIA DGX A100 systems and NVIDIA InfiniBand HDR networking.

The new supercomputer includes BlueField-2 data processing units (DPUs) which are able to offload, accelerate, and isolate user data.

This means organisations can provide private cloud access to their DGX SuperPOD infrastructure with security that spans user traffic, firewalls and multi-tenant access to storage.

NVIDIA DGX systems vice president and general manager, Charlie Boyle, explains that the new supercomputer is designed to provide a turnkey AI data center that can be shared across development and research teams.

"AI is the most powerful technology the world has ever known," Boyle adds.

Further, NVIDIA Base Command enables teams to access, share, and operate DGX SuperPOD infrastructure securely. Developers and data scientists can also provision and schedule workloads on DGX infrastructure. Base Command also provides inbuilt telemetry for users to validate deep learning techniques, workload settings and resource allocations.

Customers using the DGX SuperPODs so far include Sony Group Corporation, NAVER, Recursion, and VinAI. Sony is using DGX SuperPOD to enable its corporate research and development team to bring AI across its business, while NAVER is training AI language models at scale on DGX SuperPOD to develop new eCommerce, search, entertainment and payment applications.

Pharmaceutical company Schrödinger will also use the DGX SuperPOD to leverage AI and physics as part of its drug development processes.

The NVIDIA DGX SuperPODs will be available in Q2 2021 through NVIDIA's global partners, which can provide pricing to qualified customers upon request.   Base Command will also be available in Q2.

The company has also announced a subscription offering for its NVIDIA DGX Station A100 workgroup appliance that supports NVIDIA Multi-Instance GPU technology.

The DGX Station A100 appliance features four NVIDIA A100 80GB GPUs.  According to NVIDIA, as many as 28 data scientists can share a DGX Station A100 simultaneously.

Subscriptions for NVIDIA DGX Station A100 are available starting at a list price of US$9,000 per month.