People agree: accelerated computing is energy-efficient computing. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), the U.S. Department of Energy's lead facility for open science, measured results across four of its key high performance computing and AI applications.

They clocked how fast the applications ran and how much energy they consumed on CPU-only and GPU-accelerated nodes on Perlmutter, one of the world's largest supercomputers using NVIDIA GPUs. The results were clear. Accelerated with NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, energy efficiency rose 5x on average. An application for weather forecasting logged gains of 9.8x.

Increasing its HPL score from 1.02 Eflop/s in November 2022 to an impressive 1.194 Eflop/s on this list, Frontier was able to improve upon its score after a stagnation between June 2022 and November 2022. Considering exascale was only a goal to aspire to just a few years ago, a roughly 17% increase here is an enormous success. Additionally, Frontier earned a score of 9.95 Eflop/s on the HLP-MxP benchmark, which measures performance for mixed-precision calculation. This is also an increase over the 7.94 EFlop/s that the system achieved on the previous list and nearly 10 times more powerful than the machine's HPL score. Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and utilizes AMD EPYC 64C 2 GHz processors. It also has 8,699,904 cores and an incredible energy efficiency rating of 52.59 Gflops/watt. It also relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.

The recent growth in demand for training Large Language Models (LLMs) like Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has sparked the interest of many companies to invest in GPU solutions that are used to train these models. However, countries like China have struggled with US sanctions, and NVIDIA has to create custom models that meet US export regulations. Carrying two GPUs, H800 and A800, they represent cut-down versions of the original H100 and A100, respectively. We reported about H800; however, it remained as mysterious as A800 that we are talking about today. Thanks to MyDrivers, we have information that the A800 GPU performance is within 70% of the regular A100.

The regular A100 GPU manages 9.7 TeraFLOPs of FP64, 19.5 TeraFLOPS of FP64 Tensor, and up to 624 BF16/FP16 TeraFLOPS with sparsity. A rough napkin math would suggest that 70% performance of the original (a 30% cut) would equal 6.8 TeraFLOPs of FP64 precision, 13.7 TeraFLOPs of FP64 Tensor, and 437 BF16/FP16 TeraFLOPs with sparsity. MyDrivers notes that A800 can be had for 100,000 Yuan, translating to about 14,462 USD at the time of writing. This is not the most capable GPU that Chinese companies can acquire, as H800 exists. However, we don't have any information about its performance for now.

NVIDIA's H100 has recently become available to use via Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), and it was only a matter of time before someone decided to benchmark its performance and compare it to the previous generation's A100 GPU. Today, thanks to the benchmarks of MosaicML, a startup company led by the ex-CEO of Nervana and GM of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Intel, Naveen Rao, we have some comparison between these two GPUs with a fascinating insight about the cost factor. Firstly, MosaicML has taken Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models of various sizes and trained them using bfloat16 and FP8 Floating Point precision formats. All training occurred on CoreWeave cloud GPU instances.

Regarding performance, the NVIDIA H100 GPU achieved anywhere from 2.2x to 3.3x speedup. However, an interesting finding emerges when comparing the cost of running these GPUs in the cloud. CoreWeave prices the H100 SXM GPUs at $4.76/hr/GPU, while the A100 80 GB SXM gets $2.21/hr/GPU pricing. While the H100 is 2.2x more expensive, the performance makes it up, resulting in less time to train a model and a lower price for the training process. This inherently makes H100 more attractive for researchers and companies wanting to train Large Language Models (LLMs) and makes choosing the newer GPU more viable, despite the increased cost. Below, you can see tables of comparison between two GPUs in training time, speedup, and cost of training.

Alphacool expands the portfolio of the Enterprise Solutions series for GPU water coolers and presents the new ES NV A100 80 GB PCIe, ES RTX A4000 with backplate and ES RTX 6000 Ada 48 GB.

To best dissipate the enormous waste heat of this GPU generation, the cooler is positioned close to the components to be cooled in an exemplary manner. The fin structure has been adapted and allows a very good water flow while increasing the cooling surface. The modified jetplate with improved inflow engine ensures optimal distribution of water on the cooling fins. The fully chromed copper base is resistant to acids, scratches and damages. The matte carbon finish gives the cooler a noble appearance. At the same time, this makes it interesting for private users who want to do without aRGB lighting.

Golf Jiao, a co-founder and general manager of Biren Technology, has left the company late last month according to insider sources in China. No official statement has been issued by the executive team at Biren Tech, and Jiao has not provided any details regarding his departure from the fabless semiconductor design company. The Shanghai-based firm is a relatively new startup - it was founded in 2019 by several former NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Alibaba veterans. Biren Tech received $726.6 million in funding for its debut range of general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs), also defined as high-performance computing graphics processing units (HPC GPUs).

The company revealed its ambitions to take on NVIDIA's Ampere A100 and Hopper H100 compute platforms, and last August announced two HPC GPUs in the form of the BR100 and BR104. The specifications and performance charts demonstrated impressive figures, but Biren Tech had to roll back its numbers when it was hit by U.S Government enforced sanctions in October 2022. The fabless company had contracted with TSMC to produce its Biren range, and the new set of rules resulted in shipments from the Taiwanese foundry being halted. Biren Tech cut its work force by a third soon after losing its supply chain with TSMC, and the engineering team had to reassess how the BR100 and BR104 would perform on a process node larger than the original 7 nm design. It was decided that a downgrade in transfer rates would appease the legal teams, and get newly redesigned Biren silicon back onto the assembly line.

NVIDIA's H100 accelerator is one of the most powerful solutions for powering AI workloads. And, of course, every company and government wants to use it to power its AI workload. However, in countries like China, shipment of US-made goods is challenging. With export regulations in place, NVIDIA had to get creative and make a specific version of its H100 GPU for the Chinese market, labeled the H800 model. Late last year, NVIDIA also created a China-specific version of the A100 model called A800, with the only difference being the chip-to-chip interconnect bandwidth being dropped from 600 GB/s to 400 GB/s.

This year's H800 SKU also features similar restrictions, and the company appears to have made similar sacrifices for shipping its chips to China. From the 600 GB/s bandwidth of the regular H100 PCIe model, the H800 is gutted to only 300 GB/s of bi-directional chip-to-chip interconnect bandwidth speed. While we have no data if the CUDA or Tensor core count has been adjusted, the sacrifice of bandwidth to comply with export regulations will have consequences. As the communication speed is reduced, training large models will increase the latency and slow the workload compared to the regular H100 chip. This is due to the massive data size that needs to travel from one chip to another. According to Reuters, an NVIDIA spokesperson declined to discuss other differences, stating that "our 800 series products are fully compliant with export control regulations."

Supermicro, Inc., a Total IT Solution Provider for Cloud, AI/ML, Storage, and 5G/Edge, is announcing the first in a line of powerful yet quiet and power-efficient NVIDIA-accelerated AI Development platforms which gives information professionals and developers the most powerful technology available today at their deskside. The new AI development platform, the SYS-751GE-TNRT-NV1, is an application-optimized system that excels when developing and running AI-based software. This innovative system gives developers and users a complete HPC and AI resource for department workloads. In addition, this powerful system can support a small team of users running training, inference, and analytics workloads simultaneously.

The self-contained liquid-cooling feature addresses the thermal design power needs of the four NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and the two 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs to enable full performance while improving the overall system's efficiency and enabling quiet (approximately 30dB) operation in an office environment. In addition, this system is designed to accommodate high-performing CPUs and GPUs, making it ideal for AI/DL/ML and HPC applications. The system can reside in an office environment or be rack-mounted when installed in a data center environment, simplifying IT management.

ASUS today announced its participation in NVIDIA GTC, a developer conference for the era of AI and the metaverse. ASUS will offer comprehensive NVIDIA-certified server solutions that support the latest NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPU—which accelerates real-time video AI and generative AI—as well as the NVIDIA BlueField -3 DPU, igniting unprecedented innovation for supercomputing infrastructure. ASUS will also launch the new ProArt Studiobook Pro 16 OLED laptop with the NVIDIA RTX 3000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU for mobile creative professionals.

Purpose-built GPU servers for generative AI
Generative AI applications enable businesses to develop better products and services, and deliver original content tailored to the unique needs of customers and audiences. ASUS ESC8000 and ESC4000 are fully certified NVIDIA servers that support up to eight NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPUs, which deliver universal acceleration and energy efficiency for AI with up to 2.7X more generative AI performance than the previous GPU generation. ASUS ESC and RS series servers are engineered for HPC workloads, with support for the NVIDIA Bluefield-3 DPU to transform data center infrastructure, as well as NVIDIA AI Enterprise applications for streamlined AI workflows and deployment.

NVIDIA and key partners today announced the availability of new products and services featuring the NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU—the world's most powerful GPU for AI—to address rapidly growing demand for generative AI training and inference. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) announced the limited availability of new OCI Compute bare-metal GPU instances featuring H100 GPUs. Additionally, Amazon Web Services announced its forthcoming EC2 UltraClusters of Amazon EC2 P5 instances, which can scale in size up to 20,000 interconnected H100 GPUs. This follows Microsoft Azure's private preview announcement last week for its H100 virtual machine, ND H100 v5.

Additionally, Meta has now deployed its H100-powered Grand Teton AI supercomputer internally for its AI production and research teams. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced during his GTC keynote today that NVIDIA DGX H100 AI supercomputers are in full production and will be coming soon to enterprises worldwide.

NVIDIA's presence in high-performance computing has steadily increased, with various workloads benefiting from the company's AI and HPC accelerator GPUs. One of the important markets for the company is China, and export regulations are about to complicate NVIDIA's business dealing with the country. NVIDIA's major partners in the Asia Pacific region are Inspur and Huawei, which make servers powered by A100 and H100 GPU solutions. Amid the latest Biden Administration complications, the US is considering limiting more export of US-designed goods to Chinese entities. Back in 2019, the US blacklisted Huawei and restricted the sales of the latest GPU hardware to the company. Last week, the Biden Administration also blacklisted Inspur, the world's third-largest server maker.

In the Morgan Stanley conference, NVIDIA's Chief Financial Officer Colette Cress noted that: "Inspur is a partner for us, when we indicate a partner, they are helping us stand up computing for the end customers. As we work forward, we will probably be working with other partners, for them to stand-up compute within the Asia-Pac region or even other parts of the world. But again, our most important focus is focusing on the law and making sure that we follow export controls very closely. So in this case, we will look in terms of other partners to help us." This indicates that NVIDIA will lose millions of dollars in revenue due to the inability to sell its GPUs to partners like Inspur. As the company stated, complying with the export regulations is the most crucial focus.

According to TrendForce's latest survey of the server market, many cloud service providers (CSPs) have begun large-scale investments in the kinds of equipment that support artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This development is in response to the emergence of new applications such as self-driving cars, artificial intelligence of things (AIoT), and edge computing since 2018. TrendForce estimates that in 2022, AI servers that are equipped with general-purpose GPUs (GPGPUs) accounted for almost 1% of annual global server shipments. Moving into 2023, shipments of AI servers are projected to grow by 8% YoY thanks to ChatBot and similar applications generating demand across AI-related fields. Furthermore, shipments of AI servers are forecasted to increase at a CAGR of 10.8% from 2022 to 2026.

EK, the leading computer cooling solutions provider, is now offering an enterprise-grade GPU water block for PNY NVIDIA A100 80 GB PCIe data center GPUs. The EK-Pro GPU WB A100 80 GB Rack - Nickel + Inox is a high-performance water block specifically engineered to make the entire GPU and water block assembly as thin as possible, effectively allowing it to consume only a single PCIe slot width-wise. The water block is equipped with a rack-style terminal, considerably reducing the assembly height and increasing the chassis compatibility.

By spanning the entire PCB, the water block directly cools the GPU, HBM VRAM, and the VRM (voltage regulation module) as the cooling liquid is channeled directly over these critical areas.

The 60th edition of the TOP500 reveals that the Frontier system is still the only true exascale machine on the list.

With an HPL score of 1.102 EFlop/s, the Frontier machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) did not improve upon the score it reached on the June 2022 list. That said, Frontier's near-tripling of the HPL score received by second-place winner is still a major victory for computer science. On top of that, Frontier demonstrated a score of 7.94 EFlop/s on the HPL-MxP benchmark, which measures performance for mixed-precision calculation. Frontier is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and it relies on AMD EPYC 64C 2 GHz processor. The system has 8,730,112 cores and a power efficiency rating of 52.23 gigaflops/watt. It also relies on gigabit ethernet for data transfer.

Supermicro, a Total IT Solution Provider for Cloud, AI/ML, Storage, and 5G/Edge, is announcing that NEC Corporation has selected over 116 Supermicro GPU servers that contain dual socket 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and each with eight NVIDIA A100 80 GB GPUs. As a result, the Supermicro GPU server line can include the latest and most powerful Intel Xeon scalable processors and the most advanced AI GPUs from NVIDIA.

"Supermicro is thrilled to deliver an additional 580 PFLOPS of AI training power to its worldwide AI installations," said Charles Liang, president, and CEO, Supermicro. "Supermicro GPU servers have been installed at NEC Corporation and are used to conduct state-of-the-art AI research. Our servers are designed for the most demanding AI workloads using the highest-performing CPUs and GPUs. We continue to work with leading customers worldwide to achieve their business objectives faster and more efficiently with our advanced rack-scale server solutions."

Taiwan-based leading server manufacturing company Inventec's powerhouse GPU accelerator system, Rhyperior, is everything any modern-day business needs in the digital era, especially those relying heavily on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). A unique and optimal combination of GPUs and CPUs, this 4U GPU accelerator system is based on the NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU and Intel Xeon 3rd Gen (Whitley platform). Rhyperior also equips an NVIDIA NVSwitch to enhance performance dramatically, and its power can be an effective tool for modern workloads.

In a world where technology is disrupting our lives as we know it, GPU acceleration is critical: essentially speeding up processes that would otherwise take much longer. Acceleration boosts execution for complex computational problems that can be broken down into similar, parallel operations. In other words, an excellent accelerator can be a game changer for industries like gaming and healthcare, increasingly relying on the latest technologies like AI and ML for better, more robust solutions for consumers.

ASUS, the leading IT company in server systems, server motherboards and workstations, today announced its presence at NVIDIA GTC - a developer conference for the era of AI and the metaverse. ASUS will focus on three demonstrations outlining its strategic developments in AI, including: the methodology behind ASUS MLPerf Training v2.0 results that achieved multiple breakthrough records; a success story exploring the building of an academic AI data center at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia; and a research AI data center created in conjunction with the National Health Research Institute in Taiwan.

MLPerf benchmark results help advance machine-learning performance and efficiency, allowing researchers to evaluate the efficacy of AI training and inference based on specific server configurations. Since joining MLCommons in 2021, ASUS has gained multiple breakthrough records in the data center closed division across six AI-benchmark tasks in AI training and inferencing MLPerf Training v2.0. At the ASUS GTC session, senior ASUS software engineers will share the methodology for achieving these world-class results—as well as the company's efforts to deliver more efficient AI workflows through machine learning.

Early this month, the US Government banned American companies from exporting AI-acceleration GPUs to China and Russia, but these restrictions don't take effect before March 2023. This gives NVIDIA time to take rush-orders from Chinese companies for its AI-accelerators before the sanctions hit. The company has placed "rush orders" for a large quantity of A100 "Ampere" and H100 "Hopper" chips with TSMC, so they could be delivered to firms in China before March 2023, according to a report by Chinese business news publication UDN. The rush-orders for high-margin products such as AI-GPUs, could come as a shot in the arm for NVIDIA, which is facing a sudden loss in gaming GPU revenues, as those chips are no longer in demand from crypto-currency miners.

Super Micro Computer, Inc. (SMCI), a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking solutions, and green computing technology, is announcing its most advanced GPU server, incorporating eight NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. Due to its advanced airflow design, the new high-end GPU system will allow increased inlet temperatures, reducing a data center's overall Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) while maintaining the absolute highest performance profile. In addition, Supermicro is expanding its GPU server lineup with this new Universal GPU server, which is already the largest in the industry. Supermicro now offers three distinct Universal GPU systems: the 4U,5U, and new 8U 8GPU server. The Universal GPU platforms support both current and future Intel and AMD CPUs -- up to 400 W, 350 W, and higher.

"Supermicro is leading the industry with an extremely flexible and high-performance GPU server, which features the powerful NVIDIA A100 and H100 GPU," said Charles Liang, president, and CEO, of Supermicro. "This new server will support the next generation of CPUs and GPUs and is designed with maximum cooling capacity using the same chassis. We constantly look for innovative ways to deliver total IT Solutions to our growing customer base."

The U.S. Government has imposed restrictions on the export of AI compute GPUs to China and Russia without Government-authorization in the form of a waiver or a license. This impacts sales of products such as the NVIDIA A100, H100; AMD Instinct MI100, MI200; and the upcoming Intel "Ponte Vecchio," among others. The restrictions came to light when NVIDIA on Wednesday disclosed that it has received a Government notification about licensing requirements for export of its AI compute GPUs to Russia and China.

The notification doesn't specify the A100 and H100 by name, but defines AI inference performance thresholds to meet the licensing requirements. The Government wouldn't single out NVIDIA, and so competing products such as the AMD MI200 and the upcoming Intel Xe-HP "Ponte Vecchio" would fall within these restrictions. For NVIDIA, this is impacts $400 million in TAM, unless the Government licenses specific Russian and Chinese customers to purchase these GPUs from NVIDIA. Such trade restrictions usually come with riders to prevent resale or transshipment by companies outside the restricted region (eg: a distributor in a third waived country importing these chips in bulk and reselling them to these countries).

Chinese company Biren Technology has recently unveiled the Biren BR100 HPC GPU during their Biren Explore Summit 2022 event. The Biren BR100 features an in-house chiplet architecture with 77 billion transistors and is manufactured on a 7 nm process using TSMC's 2.5D CoWoS packaging technology. The card is equipped with 300 MB of onboard cache alongside 64 GB of HBM2E memory running at 2.3 TFLOPs. This combination delivers performance above that of the NVIDIA Ampere A100 achieving 1024 TFLOPs in 16-bit floating point operations.

The company also announced the BR104 which features a monolithic design and should offer approximately half the performance of the BR100 at a TDP of 300 W. The Biren BR104 will be available as a standard PCIe card while the BR100 will come in the form of an OAM compatible board with a custom tower cooler. The pricing and availability information for these cards is currently unknown.

ServeTheHome, a tech media outlet focused on everything server/enterprise, posted an exclusive set of photos of NVIDIA's latest H100 "Hopper" accelerator. Being the fastest GPU NVIDIA ever created, H100 is made on TSMC's 4 nm manufacturing process and features over 80 billion transistors on an 814 mm² CoWoS package designed by TSMC. Complementing the massive die, we have 80 GB of HBM3 memory that sits close to the die. Pictured below, we have an SXM5 H100 module packed with VRM and power regulation. Given that the rated TDP for this GPU is 700 Watts, power regulation is a serious concern and NVIDIA managed to keep it in check.

On the back of the card, we see one short and one longer mezzanine connector that acts as a power delivery connector, different from the previous A100 GPU layout. This board model is labeled PG520 and is very close to the official renders that NVIDIA supplied us with on launch day.

During the GTC 2022 keynote, NVIDIA announced its newest addition to the accelerator cards family. Called NVIDIA H100 accelerator, it is the company's most powerful creation ever. Utilizing 80 billion of TSMC's 4N 4 nm transistors, H100 can output some insane performance, according to NVIDIA. Featuring a new fourth-generation Tensor Core design, it can deliver a six-fold performance increase compared to A100 Tensor Cores and a two-fold MMA (Matrix Multiply Accumulate) improvement. Additionally, new DPX instructions accelerate Dynamic Programming algorithms up to seven times over the previous A100 accelerator. Thanks to the new Hopper architecture, the Streaming Module structure has been optimized for better transfer of large data blocks.

The full GH100 chip implementation features 144 SMs, and 128 FP32 CUDA cores per SM, resulting in 18,432 CUDA cores at maximum configuration. The NVIDIA H100 GPU with SXM5 board form-factor features 132 SMs, totaling 16,896 CUDA cores, while the PCIe 5.0 add-in card has 114 SMs, totaling 14,592 CUDA cores. As much as 80 GB of HBM3 memory surrounds the GPU at 3 TB/s bandwidth. Interestingly, the SXM5 variant features a very large TDP of 700 Watts, while the PCIe card is limited to 350 Watts. This is the result of better cooling solutions offered for the SXM form-factor. As far as performance figures are concerned, the SXM and PCIe versions provide two distinctive figures for each implementation. You can check out the performance estimates in various precision modes below. You can read more about the Hopper architecture and what makes it special in this whitepaper published by NVIDIA.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has selected Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to build its third-generation, high performance computing (HPC) system, called Kestrel. Named for a falcon with keen eyesight and intelligence, Kestrel's moniker is apropos for its mission—to rapidly advance the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) energy research and development (R&D) efforts to deliver transformative energy solutions to the entire United States.

Installation of the new system will begin in the fall of 2022 in NREL's Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) data center. Kestrel will complement the laboratory's current supercomputer, Eagle, during the transition. When completed—in early 2023—Kestrel will accelerate energy efficiency and renewable energy research at a pace and scale more than five times greater than Eagle, with approximately 44 petaflops of computing power.

NVIDIA's Crypto Mining (CMP) series of graphics cards are made to work only for one purpose: mining cryptocurrency coins. Hence, their functionality is somewhat limited, and they can not be used for gaming as regular GPUs can. Today, Linus Tech Tips got ahold of NVIDIA's CMP 170HX mining card, which is not listed on the company website. According to the source, the card runs on NVIDIA's GA100-105F GPU, a version based on the regular GA100 SXM design used in data-center applications. Unlike its bigger brother, the GA100-105F SKU is a cut-down design with 4480 CUDA cores and 8 GB of HBM2E memory. The complete design has 6912 cores and 40/80 GB HBM2E memory configurations.

As far as the reason for choosing 8 GB HBM2E memory goes, we know that the Ethereum DAG file is under 5 GB, so the 8 GB memory buffer is sufficient for mining any coin out there. It is powered by an 8-pin CPU power connector and draws about 250 Watts of power. It can be adjusted to 200 Watts while retaining the 165 MH/s hash rate for Ethereum. This reference design is manufactured by NVIDIA and has no active cooling, as it is meant to be cooled in high-density server racks. Only a colossal heatsink is attached, meaning that the cooling needs to come from a third party. As far as pricing is concerned, Linus managed to get this card for $5000, making it a costly mining option.More images follow...