AMD is the {hardware} of alternative for France’s first ‘AI manufacturing facility’ supercomputer

Transfer over Nvidia—France’s first Exascale Supercomputer might be powered by AMD {hardware}. Eyponomously named the Alice Recoque, after the French pc scientist who handed away in 2021, the supercomputer is a collaboration between AMD and Eviden.

Europe’s second supercomputer to this point, the Alice Recoque might be constructed with next-gen AMD EPYC CPUs, codenamed “Venice,” and AMD Intuition MI430X GPUs. The latter of those is a part of the MI400 collection of accelerators that’s geared in the direction of AI computing for scientific analysis particularly. Eviden then covers networking, connecting AMD’s parts by way of its BullSequana XH3500 platform. The entire thing is being touted as an ‘AI manufacturing facility’.

The hope is that every one of this cutting-edge tech will imply France’s first supercomputer might be able to delivering “multiple exaflop of HPL efficiency” upon completion. HPL right here refers to ‘Excessive-Efficiency Linpack’, which is a sort of benchmark to check severe processing energy, akin to what the Alice Recoque will finally possess.

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In keeping with AMD’s personal definition of HPL, this benchmark particularly includes fixing “a (random) dense linear system in double precision (64 bits) arithmetic on distributed-memory computer systems.”

I will not try and drill down into the specifics on that one, but it surely’s a benchmark particularly utilized by supercomputers to ship a giant quantity on which to hold their absurdly excessive prices. Form of like a automotive’s prime velocity, it is unlikely to hit this sorta efficiency on a regular basis, but it surely’s undoubtedly extraordinarily highly effective.

Let’s return to a topic just a little extra approachable: cash. All the mission will value an estimated €544 million. Funding is a staff effort stemming partly from the Digital Europe Programme and the Jules Verne Consortium, which incorporates companion organisations in France, the Netherlands, and Greece.

The hope is that every one these exoflops will finally “improve local weather modeling, speed up innovation in supplies and vitality, allow digital twins for customized drugs, and assist next-gen European AI fashions.”

Lengthy story quick, there’s some huge cash and a number of worldwide curiosity wrapped up on this mission. That is within the hopes of sustaining “sovereignty” in Europe’s personal AI analysis, thereby avoiding a reliance on, say, AI applied sciences based by US corporations. Nevertheless, if Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s current warning is to be believed—that “No firm goes to be immune” within the occasion of an AI bubble burst—it is laborious to foretell simply how necessary ‘sovereignty’ in AI analysis might be.