Microsoft and Nvidia have a new collaboration. It’s about building a “massive” AI-powered cloud computer.
MICROSOFT AND NVIDIA: an extreme adventure
A new partnership has been created between the supercomputer IA Cloud Microsoft and Nvidia. In fact, the two companies plan to manufacture one AI-powered “massive” cloud computing. The product would then have tens of thousands of high-end Nvidia GPUs. And to drive applications such as deep learning and large language models. That said, the two computing giants aim to make this new product one of those most powerful AI supercomputers in the world.
An ultra-powerful supercomputer: characteristics
The new supercomputer will then consist of thousands of units, which is the most powerful GPU in the world. It is Container H100, recently implemented by Nvidia. The latter will also provide its second most powerful GPU: the100. And that’s not all, it will also deploy its networking platform Quantum-2 Infiniband. This one is capable of transferring data at 400 gigabits per second between the servers.
For its part, Microsoft is bringing back its infrastructure Azure cloud and series virtual machines ND and NC. From then on, Nvidia’s AI Enterprise platform will tie it all together. In addition, Microsoft and Nvidia will work together on DeepSpeedMicrosoft’s deep learning optimization software.
What are the benefits?
As part of the collaboration, Nvidia said in a statement, the company will use the instances scalable virtual machines from Azure. The goal here is to research and accelerate the development of generative AI. This is a burgeoning field of artificial intelligence, where basic models like the Megatron Turing NLG 530B are the basis for unsupervised self-learning algorithms. In this case, the supercomputer will be able to create not only new text and code, but also digital images, video and sound.
In fact, generative AI models have risen rapidly since last year. This is, for example, the case Stable Diffusion and DALL-E that can synthesize new images as needed. Similar models have also emerged that can create videos, synthesize voices and perform transcriptions. Despite its various models, demand for generative AI continues. Although that is the ultimate goal for Microsoft and Nvidia: to have a solution to answer it.
Customers will then be able to enjoy the benefits of this new cloud computing from Microsoft and Nvidia as soon as it becomes available. In particular, they will be able to implement thousands of GPUs in a single cluster. According to Nvidia, they will even be able to “train the most massive large language models, create the most complex recommender systems at scale, and enable generative AI at scale.”
Nevertheless, until today, Microsoft and Nvidia have not given details about the filing date of the new supercomputer. Instead, they said the announcement marks the start of a “multi-year collaboration.”