U.S. tech giant Nvidia on Tuesday announced that the hyper-scale generative artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer it builds in Israel has started its initial operations.
The supercomputer, named “Israel-1,” is the country’s most powerful AI system and one of the world’s fastest supercomputers for AI calculations. It is expected to run at eight exaflops of peak AI performance and 130 petaflops of scientific computing.
The initial phase of the system was completed in less than 20 weeks, two months ahead of schedule, far faster than the several years required to build traditional supercomputers, according to a statement issued by the company.
The system is now available with up to half-capacity for use by the company’s research and development teams and selected partners in Israel, it added.
It will serve in this phase as a testbed for building supercomputers based on Nvidia’s Spectrum-X platform, an accelerated networking platform to improve the performance and efficiency of Ethernet-based AI clouds.
At a later stage, the Israeli supercomputer will be available as part of the company’s DGX Cloud supercomputing service.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, said: “With Israel-1 AI supercomputer, a broad range of innovative companies in Israel will create AI that can transform the productivity and business models of enterprises around the world.”