Nvidia Built One of the Most Powerful AI Supercomputers in 3 Weeks
by Adam Dachis
Autonomous vehicles: they’re not perfect and sometimes they kill people. But they also hold the promise of safer transportation-and far fewer jobs-in the relatively near future. To help these vehicles upgrade their intelligence from causing fatal accidents to preventing them, Nvidia created the DGX SuperPod, an AI-optimized supercomputer that can help design a better self-driving car.
Nvidia made it very clear it wants to be among the leaders in artificial intelligence and decided to build a supercomputer to demonstrate that. It only took the company three weeks to build by connecting 96 Nvidia DGX-2H supercomputers with Mellanox interconnect technology. You can actually buy it, too, if the novelty of your sixth yacht has worn off and you have $435,000 burning a hole in your pocket. That’s how much one DGX-2H costs at list price. The DGX SuperPod uses 96 of them. If you want to make a self-driving car, it seems Nvidia thinks it’ll cost somewhere in the ballpark of $41,760,000 to get started with the best hardware. Clearly, these systems were designed for large corporations.
