04/06/2020
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04/06/2020
This next-gen AI chip could be a major instrument in advancing the tech
Nvidia claims its monstrous chip provides a cheaper and faster alternative to today’s supercomputing hardware.
California based chip giant Nvidia recently unveiled its artificial intelligence chip Nvidia A100 — designed to cater to all AI workloads. Chip manufacturing has seen some major innovations in recent times. Last summer, I covered another California-based chip startup Cerebras, which raised the bar with its innovative chip design dubbed as “Wafer-Scale Engine” (WSE).
As the need for supercomputing systems gathers pace, chip manufacturers are scrambling to come up with futuristic chip designs that can cater to the needs of processing complex calculations on such systems. Intel, the biggest chip manufacturer is working on powerful “neuromorphic chips” that use the human brain as a model. This design basically replicates the working of brain neurons to process information smoothly — with the proposed chip having a computational capacity of 100 million neurons.
More recently, the Australian startup Cortical Labs has taken this idea one step further by designing a system, using a combination of biological neurons and a specialized computer chip — tapping into the power of digital systems and combining it with the power of biological neurons processing complex calculations.
Delayed by almost two months due to the pandemic, Nvidia released its 54 billion transistors monster chip, which packs 5 petaFLOPS of performance — 20 times more than the previous-generation chip Volta. The chips and the DGX A100 systems (video below) that used the chips are now available and shipping.
The third generation of Nvidia’s AI DGX platform, the current system basically gives you the computing power of an entire data center into a single rack. For a typical customer handling AI training tasks today requires 600 central processing unit (CPU) systems costing $11 million, which would need 25 racks of servers and 630 kilowatts of power. While Nvidia’s DGX A100 system provides the same processing power for $1 million, a single server rack, and 28 kilowatts of power.
It also gives you the ability to split your job into smaller workloads for faster processing — the system could be partitioned into 56 instances per system, using the A100 multi-instance GPU feature. Nvidia has already received orders from some of the biggest companies around the world. Here are few of the notable ones:
U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory was the first one to receive the AI-powered system using it to better understand and fight COVID-19.
The University of Florida will be the first U.S. institution of higher learning to deploy the DGX A100 systems in an attempt to integrate AI across its entire curriculum.
Other early adopter includes the Biomedical AI at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany leveraging the power of the system to advance clinical decision support and process optimization.
On top of this, thousands of previous-generation DGX systems clients’ around the world are now Nvidia’s prospective customers. An attempt by Nvidia to create a single microarchitecture for its GPUs for both commercial AI and consumer graphics use by switching different elements on the chip might provide it an edge in the long run.
Other releases on the occasion included Nvidia’s next-generation DGX SuperPod, a cluster of 140 DGX A100 systems capable of achieving 700 petaflops of AI computing power. Chip design finally seems to be catching up with the computing needs of the future.
Written by Faisal Khan
04/06/2020
Smart molecules could be key to computers with 100-times bigger memories
Computer hard drives of the future could be made up of smart molecules.
Researchers have discovered a single molecule ‘switch’ that can act like a transistor and offers the potential to store binary information – such as the 1s and 0s used in classical computing.
The molecule is around five square nanometres in size. This means that more than one billion of them would fit onto the cross-section of a human hair.
The international team of scientists behind the breakthrough believe that molecules like the ones they have discovered could offer information density of around 250 terabits per square inch – which is around 100 times the storage density of current hard drives.
Although the researchers do not expect that the particular molecules they discovered will be used in real hard drives, the study is an important proof of concept that brings us closer to the brave new world of true molecular electronics.
In the study, molecules of an organic salt can be switched using a small electrical input to appear either bright or dark – providing binary information. Crucially, this information can be written, read and erased, at room temperature and in normal air pressures. These are important characteristics for practical application of the molecules in computing storage devices. Most previous research into molecular electronics for similar applications has been conducted in vacuum and at very low temperatures.
Dr Stijn Mertens, Senior Lecturer in Electrochemical Surface Science at Lancaster University and lead researcher on the study, said: “There is an entire list of properties that a molecule has to possess to be useful as a molecular memory. Apart from being switchable in both directions under ambient conditions, it has to be stable for a long time in the bright and dark state, and also spontaneously form highly ordered layers that are only one molecule thick, in a process called self-assembly. Ours is the first example that combines all these features in the same molecule.”
In laboratory experiments, the research team used small electric pulses in a scanning tunnelling microscope to switch individual molecules from bright to dark. They were also able to read and erase the information afterwards, at the press of a button.
During the switching, the electric pulse changes the way the cation and the anion in the organic salt are stacked together, and this stacking causes the molecule to appear either bright or dark. Apart from the switching itself, also the spontaneous ordering of the molecules is crucial: through self-assembly, they find their way into a highly ordered structure (a two-dimensional crystal), without the need for expensive manufacturing tools as is the case in currently used electronics.
“Because chemistry allows us to make molecules with sophisticated functions in enormous numbers and with atomic precision, molecular electronics may have a very bright future,” says Dr Mertens.
The research is detailed in the paper ‘Ambient bistable single dipole switching in a molecular monolayer’, which has been published by the journal Angewandte Chemie.
Source: Lancaster University
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