The name Iara is associated with a legend of Brazilian folklore – that of a beautiful mermaid who lives in Amazonian waters. And, from now on, it also represents the largest Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure in Latin America: the IARA Lab.
The heart is the first supercomputer in Brazil designed to contribute to the acceleration of research and development projects for AI solutions. Built in partnership with Samsung, using resources from the Informatics Law, the new supercomputer has technology from NVIDIA Enterprise, a company that invented the GPU (graphics processing unit) and revolutionized parallel computing. Its capacity is 125 petaflops of performance, which is equivalent to 2 million notebooks working together.
“SiDi’s AI private cloud can run thousands of simulations and analyze millions of data points in a fraction of the time,” says SiDi superintendent John Yi. “With this, we hope to transform the customer experience with a new generation of intelligent applications and solutions. This would be impossible without a distributed and fully automated environment ”, he emphasizes.
Installed in a data center in São Paulo, the supercomputer occupies an area of 100 square meters and is already in operation. It has 25 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems interconnected on an NVIDIA Mellanox InfiniBand network, which offer a capacity equivalent to the current 8.7 million smartphones. Plus 1.5 petabytes of storage, based on Pure Storage’s Flashblade technology, capable of supporting the computational performance of the DGX platform and the needs of the project. NVLink interconnection and NVIDIA support for corporate network standards with maximum bandwidth help with reduced latency. This allows customers to quickly access multiple GPUs within the SiDi AI cloud.
“Building our AI infrastructure with NVIDIA DGX has provided us with internal resources similar to those offered in the world by major cloud service providers, with some significant savings in total cost of ownership,” says John Yi. “This is another step for SiDi to become a center of excellence in projects with Artificial Intelligence, natural language processing and machine learning. The partnership with Samsung and NVIDIA will guarantee SiDi a prominent position in the universe of High Performance Computing (HPC) ”, he concludes.