NVIDIA announced this Wednesday, Nov. 16, a multi-year collaboration with Microsoft to build an AI supercomputer that is expected to be among the most powerful in the world, powered by Microsoft Azure’s advanced supercomputing infrastructure combined with NVIDIA GPUs, networking solution and comprehensive AI software stack to help enterprises train, deploy and scale AI, including large, state-of-the-art models.
Azure’s cloud-based AI supercomputer will include powerful and scalable ND and NC series virtual machines optimized for distributed AI training and inference. It is the first public cloud to integrate NVIDIA’s advanced AI stack, adding tens of thousands of NVIDIA A100 and H100 GPUs, NVIDIA Quantum-2400Gb/s InfiniBand networking and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite to its platform.
Current Azure instances offer previous generation Nvidia A100 GPUs combined with Quantum 200Gb/s InfiniBand networking. Combined with Azure’s advanced compute cloud infrastructure, networking, and storage, the new instances will provide scalable peak performance for AI training and deep learning inference workloads of any size.
NVIDIA AI Enterprise, which includes NVIDIA Riva for speech AI and NVIDIA Morpheus cybersecurity application frameworks, will streamline every step of the AI workflow, from data processing and AI model training to simulation and large-scale deployment.
As part of the collaboration, NVIDIA will use Azure’s scalable virtual machine instances to research and accelerate advances in generative AI, an emerging area of AI in which fundamental models such as Megatron Turing NLG 530B, (the 530 billion parameter language model introduced in October 2021 by Microsoft and NVIDIA), form the basis for unsupervised self-learning algorithms to create new text, code, digital images, video or audio.
The companies will also collaborate to optimize Microsoft’s DeepSpeed software suite. NVIDIA’s full stack of AI workflows and software development kits, optimized for Azure, will be made available to Azure enterprise customers.
Manuvir Das, vice president of enterprise computing at NVIDIA, said:
“AI technology advances as well as industry adoption are accelerating. The breakthrough of foundation models has unleashed a tidal wave of research, fostered new startups and enabled new enterprise applications. Our collaboration with Microsoft will provide researchers and businesses with state-of-the-art AI infrastructure and software to leverage the transformative power of AI.”
Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Cloud + AI group at Microsoft, concludes:
“AI is fueling the next wave of automation in business and industrial computing, enabling organizations to do more with less as they navigate economic uncertainties. Our collaboration with NVIDIA unlocks the world’s most scalable supercomputing platform, delivering cutting-edge AI capabilities for every business on Microsoft Azure.”
Translated from NVIDIA et Microsoft s’associent pour construire un supercalculateur d’IA
