Microsoft and Nvidia unveil HGX-1 hyperscale GPU accelerator

Blueprints for a new hyperscale GPU accelerator have been introduced recently, jointly by Microsoft and NVIDIA. The two companies are saying the accelerator would "drive AI cloud computing."

The accelerator is called HGX-1 hyperscale GPU. It is released in conjunction with Microsoft’s Project Olympus, as an open-source design.

The two companies are equalling HGX-1 to ATX (Advance Technology eXtended), saying HGX-1 willl do to cloud-based AI workloads what ATX did for PC motherboards. It creates an industry standard, making market demand easier to fulfil.

Microsoft and NVIDIA are hoping the new accelerator will find its application in autonomous driving, personalized healthcare, and voice recognition, among other industries.

"AI is a new computing model that requires a new architecture," says Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and chief executive officer of NVIDIA. "The HGX-1 hyperscale GPU accelerator will do for AI cloud computing what the ATX standard did to make PCs pervasive today. It will enable cloud-service providers to easily adopt NVIDIA GPUs to meet surging demand for AI computing."

"The HGX-1 AI accelerator provides extreme performance scalability to meet the demanding requirements of fast-growing machine learning workloads, and its unique design allows it to be easily adopted into existing data centers around the world," writes Kushagra Vaid, general manager and distinguished engineer, Azure Hardware Infrastructure, Microsoft, in a blog post.

The accelerator is powered by eight NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs in each chassis. You can find out more details about it on this link.

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