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Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs

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111–120 of 182 posts

Re: Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs

#111
post #9

Kinda feels like the main thing google launches is waiting lists.

Gmail was a waitlist or invite only for many years. And that must’ve been their most successful product launch since search

That was nearly 20 years ago though. That's an eternity in tech years. Google and the industry have changed since then.

Re: Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs

#112
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in this case they just know the demand is RED HOT and they don't have nearly the supply to go around. I don't think it's really the typical new product concerns on this one (product-market fit, are we covering use cases, are there technical problems, etc.). They know people want this and would rather have it right this second, problems and all, than wait for a slow rollout; Google just doesn't have the supply…

Then sell it for more. Just give me a price. Or let me bid on it. Or, don't announce it like it's launched until it's usable.

If your demand for this is so urgent, it sounds like you want your own hardware. Here you go, that’ll be 38k for just the H100:

https://serverevolution.com/nvidia-900-21010-0000-000.html

Re: Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs

#113
post #77

Should we buy Nvidia stock then? The greatest technological advancement in recent years critically depends on the hardware from a single company with no competition. yet Nvidia stock is still below its 2021 peak. How so?

ASML is the one company behind all the chips

As far as stock prices, there was a hype cycle paired with government handouts to the people, these combined to push tech stocks to unreasonable valuations.

Re: Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs

#114
post #43
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TPUs do compete with GPUs for ML tasks, so yes, this is evidence that GPUs are winning. The only alternative I could imagine is that TPUs will "win" at supercomputers exclusivity aimed at inference (as opposed to training). Since TPUs excel at inference. The question is how much ML compute is used for inference as opposed to training. Not much, I guess, otherwise something like TPUs would be more popular.

Since you seem knowledgable on this topic, what is it that TPUs do differently than GPUs? Why are they better at inference?

They have published various papers and technical reports. The main aim is to make them inhouse and more efficient. Each generation is a little different, like (iirc) v3 is not for training, more for serving at inference time. The use different floating point format and circuits, so they are not good for scientific workloads, iirc again.

Re: Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs

#115
post #29

I think the most interesting AI hardware stuff is about memristors or some type of compute-in-memory. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.07470.pdf https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9669041 Maybe there will be something like transformers but more suited to crossbar arrays of memristors. If that actually makes sense.

I think HP has all the patents on these. Maybe when their patents expire some company that can actually release a product will make good use of them instead of having a business model consisting of bricking printers that use off-brand ink.

Re: Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs

#116
post #77

Should we buy Nvidia stock then? The greatest technological advancement in recent years critically depends on the hardware from a single company with no competition. yet Nvidia stock is still below its 2021 peak. How so?

A significant part of the 2021 peak may be explained by the crypto craze from which Nvidia benefited greatly and which has almost completely vanished since.

Thinking about it, it’s hard to believe how fast the hype cycle moved on from crypto. Only 1-2 years ago every media person, influencer, YouTuber, tweeter etc. were talking about/selling/shilling some kind of crypto, and now all of it seems to have moved on to AGI doomsaying.

Re: Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs

#117
post #54

People want to rent the pricey NVIDIA DGX H100. So Google just put it in their DC, letting customers pay its full price it every ~3 months; plus they don't have to operate it, which is win (or is it ?).

they have to pay for the power and the staff to set them up/manage it

I wish that humanity gets to harvest static energy one day, so that everyone is able to run the experiments required in large-scale deep learning research, not only a handful of deep pocketed organizations.

Re: Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs

#118
post #73
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly the "4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors" themselves have up to 2.45 TBps in memory bandwidth, with the 8-socket configuration, or 2 TBps with 2-socket Xeon Max and HBM. If they'd make an 8-socket Xeon Max it would have 8 TBps. Considering that the Xeon Max 9462 is $8000 vs. the H100 going for north of $40,000, that could be interesting.

The throughput these gpu's have make the price pretty competitive, but I think AMD is working on a APU in their instinct lineup. That could be pretty competitive since Nvidia is overcharging for memory and you could just use sticks instead

Only if you're purely 100% compute bound by a wide margin versus the size of your working set. But in that scenario, you can just widen the memory interface, lower the clocks speeds, and you'll normally still come out ahead in efficiency. Most datacenter parts are going to prefer such a route.

The physical integrity needed for extremely high bandwidth interfaces is just really tough to achieve on a DIMM-like slot without really advanced high-channel socket topologies. Those numbers listed before aren't for nothing; 2.4TBps bandwith for an 8-socket Xeon vs 2.0Tbps with a 2-socket Xeon using HBM2 is a very significant improvement in overall efficiency.

Re: Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs

#119
post #97
post #93

AMD should be gifting their GPUs by the dozens to the most prolific Open Source contributors if they want a piece of the cake. Their lack of access to CUDA is really harming them badly.

It's more than just that: for the money, their consumer GPUs don't compete in compute tasks (especially inference/training) and their Linux compute drivers are a pile of steaming garbage on consumer hardware. It's really interesting/depressing to watch as they've done a nice job of supplying good open source graphics drivers. They really seem to be lacking something at a leadership level in terms of understanding GPU…

I'd think their leadership is aware. Likely they are just picking their battles to be in strategic areas where they'll capture the most revenue to resource-investment. AMD has a lot of catching up to do and they cannot compete on all fronts at once.

Re: Google Launches AI Supercomputer Powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs

#120
post #29

I think the most interesting AI hardware stuff is about memristors or some type of compute-in-memory. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.07470.pdf https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9669041 Maybe there will be something like transformers but more suited to crossbar arrays of memristors. If that actually makes sense.

I have yet to see a proposal for compute-in-memory that isn’t actually compute-near-memory and keeps the density of memory arrays.

If you’re still doing row-column access, it’s just another Von Neumann machine. If you have compute hardware within each row to perform operations on every row in parallel, it’s now just another ALU.

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