Fujitsu to deploy NVIDIA DGX-1 AI sysems at RIKEN in Japan

Source: Fujitsu. Twenty-four NVIDIA DGX-1 AI systems power the new RIKEN supercomputer in Japan.  

Fujitsu announced today that it is using 24 NVIDIA DGX-1 artificial intelligence (AI) systems to help build a supercomputer for RIKEN, Japan’s largest comprehensive research institution, for deep learning research.

The largest customer installation of DGX-1 systems to date, the supercomputer will accelerate the application of AI to solve complex challenges in healthcare, manufacturing and public safety.

“DGX-1 is like a time-machine for AI researchers,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Enterprises, research centres and universities worldwide are adopting DGX-1 to ride the wave of deep learning — the technology breakthrough at the centre of the AI revolution.”

The RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project will use the new supercomputer, scheduled to go online next month, to accelerate AI research in areas such as medicine, manufacturing, healthcare and disaster preparedness. “We believe that the NVIDIA DGX-1-based system will accelerate real-world implementation of the latest AI technologies technologies as well as research into next-generation AI algorithms,” said Arimichi Kunisawa, head of the Technical Computing Solution Unit at Fujitsu.

“Fujitsu is leveraging its extensive experience in high-performance computing development and AI research to support R&D that utilises this system, contributing to the creation of a future in which AI is used to find solutions to a variety of social issues.”

Conventional high performance computing (HPC) architectures are proving too costly and inefficient for meeting the needs of AI researchers, NVIDIA said, driving companies to look at the graphics processing unit (GPU)-based solutions that reduce cost and power consumption while increasing performance. Each DGX-1 combines the power of eight NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs with an integrated software stack optimised for deep learning frameworks, delivering the performance of 250 conventional x86 servers.

The system features a number of innovations unique to the DGX-1, including:

 Containerised deep learning frameworks, optimised by NVIDIA for maximum GPU accelerated deep learning training

 Greater performance and multi-GPU scaling with NVIDIA NVLink, accelerating time to discovery

 An integrated software and hardware architecture optimised for deep learning

The supercomputer will also use 32 Fujitsu PRIMERGY servers, which, combined with the DGX-1
systems, will boost its total theoretical processing performance to 4 petaflops when running
half-precision floating-point calculations.