Our solution is part of the international RICAIP project
Research and Innovation Centre on Advanced Industrial Production
The RICAIP project (Research and Innovation Center on Advanced Industrial Production) was launched at CIIRC ČVUT in Prague last year: It is a strategic research cooperation between the Czech Republic and Germany, which will bring great changes in industrial production in the future. This platform will examine, among other things, the use of artificial intelligence and industrial robotics. The goal is to shift the understanding of automated industrial production as we know it today to production that is extremely flexible and distributed, and sometimes referred to as Industry 4.0.
The partners of the international RICAIP project are its main coordinator CIIRC ČVUT, then CEITEC VUT and on behalf of the German side DFKI and ZeMA based in Saarbrücken.
The significance and potential of the project is also evidenced by the participation of Tomas Mikolov (AI Expert Tomas Mikolov is coming from Facebook AI to join RICAIP team), the world’s leading expert in artificial intelligence research with experience from Google, Microsoft or Facebook. And it is artificial intelligence that is related to the solution that M Computers provided for this project.
Supercomputer for AI
A necessary part of the research is the computational power in the background. However, choosing the right one is not easy – whether in terms of technology, performance or efficiency. M Computers therefore delivered a solution based on NVIDIA DGX-1 MaxQ technology. It is a version of the classic NVIDIA DGX-1 solution specially designed for research institutions.
Relative performance of traditional CPU computing environment, GPU environment vs. NVIDIA DGX-1.
The most effective solution
The uniqueness of the DGX-1 MaxQ lies in the optimization of the power / consumption ratio: With half the energy consumption, it reaches 80% of the performance of the classic DGX-1!
This not only brings significant savings in terms of operating and acquisition costs, but also contributes to the sustainability of the research.
The main features of DGX-1 MaxQ
The RICAIP project has been using a rack with five NVIDIA DGX-1 MaxQs since May 2020.
In each of these devices, there are eight NVIDIA V100 accelerators connected by NVLinks, so the whole solution uses 40 accelerators with a total performance of 4.3 TFLOPS (mixed precision) for AI applications.
A total of 204,800 computing (CUDA) cores work in the supercomputer using 2.5 TB of RAM. The parameters of one unit are clearly shown in the table:
