Switzerland, HPE and NVIDIA to Build the World’s Most Powerful AI-Capable Supercomputer

On April 12, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NVIDIA announced that they are creating what is expected to be the world’s most powerful AI-capable supercomputer. As an enabler of global scientific research, the “Alps” system infrastructure will replace CSCS’s existing Piz Daint supercomputer and serve as a general-purpose system open to the broad community of researchers in Switzerland and the rest of the world.

Alps will be built by HPE based on the new HPE Cray EX supercomputer product line, which is a high performance computing (HPC) architecture designed to harness insights from vast, ever-increasing amounts of complex data. Taking advantage of the tight coupling between NVIDIA CPUs and GPUs, Alps will be able to train GPT-3, one of the world’s largest natural language processing models, in only two days — 7x faster than NVIDIA’s 2.8-AI exaflops Selene supercomputer, currently recognized as the world’s leading supercomputer for AI by MLPerf.

Planned to come online in 2023, the “Alps” system infrastructure will enable breakthrough research on a wide range of fields, including climate and weather, materials sciences, astrophysics, computational fluid dynamics, life sciences, molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry and particle physics, as well as domains like economics and social sciences. (Source)