The international computer and AI company, Nvidia, announced that it will build in Israel, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world in the field of artificial intelligence. The computer, called “Israel-1”, is expected to enter initial use by the end of the year, and will initially be used by Nvidia for research and development needs and collaborations with the entire industry.
Down the road, the computer will be available as part of Nvidia’s cloud supercomputing service, NVIDIA DGX Cloud, so that organizations, start-up companies, research bodies, and more can make use of it. Nvidia, which purchased the Israeli computer company Mellanox in 2020 for $7 billion, employs about 3,000 people in Israel; Its R&D center is in Israel as well.
♥️🙏🇮🇱 @nvidia Corp announced today that it is building one of most powerful AI supercomputer in Israel. The system, called Israel-1, is expected to deliver performance of up to eight exaflops of AI computing. ♥️🙏🇮🇱#StandWithIsrael
— Afshine Emrani MD FACC (@afshineesmrani) May 30, 2023
https://t.co/6wsML6eMMP
Supercomputers are an integrated array of tens and hundreds of thousands of processing units, connected and working together under one operating system. Supercomputers are used to perform demanding computational tasks such as drug development, deciphering molecules, research in the field of quantum mechanics, weather forecasting and climate research, oil and gas discovery, running models and simulations, and more.
According to the specifications published by Nvidia, Israel-1 will include 2,048 Nvidia H100 graphics processors, each of which includes 80 billion transistors. And with more than 34 million CUDA cores and over a million 4th generation Tensor cores. The supercomputer will also incorporate 2,560 BlueField-3 DPU processors and 80 Spectrum-4 switches that are all developed in Israel. The architecture of the Israeli supercomputer will be based on the new Spectrum-X platform developed by Nvidia in Israel and will serve as a template for building additional supercomputers.
Tech giant Nvidia building Israel’s ‘most powerful’ AI supercomputer #Nvidia #Israel #AI https://t.co/DUY9SEfrec pic.twitter.com/m2OrvDhn82
— Eli Dror (@edrormba) May 29, 2023
According to the “Top500” list, which groups the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, as of November 2022, the fastest supercomputer in the world is the Frontier, located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the state of Tennessee, and it boasts a computational capacity of 1,102 petaflops. Because of their abilities, supercomputers are of strategic importance in the inter-power balance of power. According to the Top500 list, of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, 150 supercomputers are in the United States, while 134 supercomputers are in China. Germany and Japan also have a high concentration of Supercomputers. It seems that according to the accepted metrics, the Israel-1 will be among the ten most powerful supercomputers in the world.
