NVIDIA CEO Introduces Software, Silicon, Supercomputers for the Da Vincis of Our Time'

Buckle up. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang just laid out a singular vision filled with autonomous machines, super-intelligent AIs and sprawling virtual worlds from silicon to supercomputers to AI software in a single presentation.

NVIDIA is a computing platform company, helping to advance the work for the Da Vincis of our time - in language understanding, drug discovery, or quantum computing, Huang said in a talk delivered from behind his kitchen counter to NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference. NVIDIA is the instrument for your life's work.

During a presentation punctuated with product announcements, partnerships, and demos that danced up and down the modern technology stack, Huang spoke about how NVIDIA is investing heavily in CPUs, DPUs, and GPUs and weaving them into new data center scale computing solutions for researchers and enterprises.

He talked about NVIDIA as a software company, offering a host of software built on NVIDIA AI as well as NVIDIA Omniverse for simulation, collaboration, and training autonomous machines.

Finally, Huang spoke about how NVIDIA is moving automotive computing forward with a new SoC, NVIDIA Atlan, and new simulation capabilities.

CPUs, DPUs and GPUs Huang announced NVIDIA's first data center CPU, Grace, named after Grace Hopper, a U.S. Navy rear admiral and computer programming pioneer.

Grace is a highly specialized processor targeting largest data intensive HPC and AI applications as the training of next-generation natural-language processing models that have more than one trillion parameters.

When tightly coupled with NVIDIA GPUs, a Grace-based system will deliver 10x faster performance than today's state-of-the-art NVIDIA DGX-based systems, which run on x86 CPUs.

While the vast majority of data centers are expected to be served by existing CPUs, Gracewill serve a niche segment of computing. Grace highlights the beauty of Arm, Huang said.

Huang also announced that the Swiss National Supercomputing Center will build a supercomputer, dubbed Alps, will be powered by Grace and NVIDIA's next-generation GPU. U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory will also bring a Grace-powered supercomputer online in 2023, NVIDIA announced.

Accelerating Data Centers with BlueField-3 Further accelerating the infrastructure upon which hyperscale data centers, workstations, and supercomputers are built, Huang announced the NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU.

The next-generation data processing unit will deliver the most powerful software-defined networking, storage and cybersecurity acceleration capabilities.

Where BlueField-2 offloaded the equivalent of 30 CPU cores, it would take 300 CPU cores to secure, offload, and accelerate network traffic at 400 Gbps as BlueField-3- a 10x leap in performance, Huang explained.

Three Chips' Grace and BlueField are key parts of a data center roadmap consisting of 3 chips: CPU, GPU, and DPU, Huang said. Each chip architecture has a two-year rhythm with likely a kicker in between. One year will focus on x86 platforms, the next on Arm platforms.

Every year will see new exciting products from us, Huang said. Three chips, yearly leaps, one architecture.

Expanding Arm into the Cloud Arm, Huang said, is the most popular CPU in the world. For good reason - it's super energy-efficient and its open licensing model inspires a world of innovators, he said.

For other markets like cloud, enterprise and edge data centers, supercomputing, and PC, Arm is just starting. Huang announced key Arm partnerships - Amazon Web Services in cloud computing, Ampere Computing in scientific and cloud computing, Marvel in hyper-converged edge servers, and MediaTek to create a Chrome OS and Linux PC SDK and reference system.

DGX A Computer for AI

Weaving together NVIDIA silicon and software, Huang announced upgrades to NVIDIA's DGX Station AI data center in-a-box for workgroups, and the NVIDIA DGX SuperPod, NVIDIA's AI-data-center-as-a-product for intensive AI research and development.

The new DGX Station 320G harnesses 320Gbytes of super-fast HBM2e connected to 4 NVIDIA A100 GPUs over 8 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth. Yet it plugs into a normal wall outlet and consumes just 1500 watts of power, Huang said.

The DGX SuperPOD gets the new 80GB NVIDIA A100, bringing the SuperPOD to 90 terabytes of HBM2e memory. It's been upgraded with NVIDIA BlueField-2, and NVIDIA is now offering it with the NVIDIA Base Command DGX management and orchestration tool.

NVIDIA EGX for Enterprise Further democratizing AI, Huang introduced a new class of NVIDIA-certified systems, high-volume enterprise servers from top manufacturers. They're now certified to run the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite, exclusively certified for VMware vSphere 7, the world's most widely used compute virtualization platform.

Expanding the NVIDIA-certified servers ecosystem is a new wave of systems featuring the NVIDIA A30 GPU for mainstream AI and data analytics and the NVIDIA A10 GPU for AI-enabled graphics, virtual workstations and mixed compute and graphics workloads, announced today.

AI-on-5G Huang also discussed NVIDIA's AI-on-5G computing platform - bringing together 5G and AI into a new type of computing platform designed for the edge that pairs the NVIDIA Aerial software development kit with the NVIDIA BlueField-2 A100, combining GPUs and CPUs into the most advanced PCIE card ever created.

Partners Fujitsu, Google Cloud, Mavenir, Radisys and Wind River are all developing solutions for NVIDIA's AI-on-5G platform.

NVIDIA AI and NVIDIA Omniverse Virtual, real-time, 3d worlds inhabited by people, AIs, and robots are no longer science-fiction.

NVIDIA Omniverse is cloud-native, scalable to multiple GPUs, physically accurate, takes advantage of RTX real-time path tracing and DLSS, simulates materials

LINK:	https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/04/12/gtc-keynote/...
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