Nvidia has completed the first phase of its Israel-1 AI supercomputer, one of the world’s fastest AI computers expected to deliver performance of up to eight exaflops of AI computing, with one exaflop performing 1 quintillion – or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 – calculations per second.
Located in Nvidia’s Israel data center, Israel-1 is now operational for use by the company’s research and development teams as well as selected partners.
According to Gilad Shainer, a senior vice president at Nvidia, Nvidia worked with 800 startups in Israel and tens of thousands of software engineers to build Israel-1.
The senior vice president will include 256 Nvidia HGX H100 systems, comprising 2,048 Nvidia H100 80GB GPUs with over 34 million CUDA cores and 1 million fourth-generation Tensor Cores, along with 2,560 BlueField-3 DPUs and 80 Spectrum-4 switches.
The first phase, completed in under 20 weeks and two months ahead of schedule, incorporates Dell PowerEdge XE9680 servers based on 128 Nvidia HGX H100 systems, 1,280 BlueField-3 DPUs, and more than 40 Spectrum-4 switches. This initial stage provides half of the computing power of the full system, delivering four exaflops for AI and 65 petaflops for standard HPC.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, highlighted Israel’s position as a hub for leading AI researchers and developers and emphasized the transformative potential of Nvidia’s Israel-1 AI supercomputer.
Israel is home to world-leading AI researchers and developers creating applications for the next wave of AI,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. “With Nvidia’s 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.
The system will serve as a testbed for Nvidia’s Spectrum-X, a networking platform developed in Israel to enhance the performance and efficiency of Ethernet-based AI clouds. Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo are slated to be the first to integrate Spectrum-X technologies.
Originally announced in May 2023, Israel-1 is part of Nvidia’s broader efforts in supercomputing. The second stage of the supercomputer is scheduled for completion in the first half of 2024. Notably, Nvidia is also working on another supercomputer, Taipei-1, in Taiwan, featuring 64 DGX H100 AI systems and 64 OVX systems. The cloud-based Israel-1 system represents a substantial investment, totaling “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
