Tesla showcased its new supercomputer which is being claimed as the fifth most powerful computer in the world.
The Silicon Valley-based EV maker is using this supercomputer to power its advanced driving assistance system, Autopilot, and self-driving technology.
Tesla’s new Autopilot system and the upcoming autonomous driving software works on complex neural networks. Hence, this supercomputer is said to be useful in training these complex neural nets.
Just last month, Tesla announced Tesla Vision, it’s a new Autopilot system that uses camera-vision and deep neural networks.
This computer was revealed by the head of Tesla’s AI, Andrej Karpathy, at a recent workshop on autonomous driving at 2021 CVPR (Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition).
Tesla Builds In-House Supercomputer
At the conference, Karpathy presented Tesla’s third supercomputer cluster with unbelievable specs. Let’s have a quick look at it:
Tesla’s Supercomputer Specs:
- 720 nodes of 8x A100 80GB. (5760 GPUs total)
- 1.8 EFLOPS (720 nodes * 312 TFLOPS-FP16-A100 * 8 gpu/nodes)
- 10 PB of “hot tier” NVME storage @ 1.6 TBps
- 640 Tbps of total switching capacity
He said, “For us, computer vision is the bread and butter of what we do and what enables Autopilot. And for that to work really well, we need to master the data from the fleet, and train massive neural nets and experiment a lot. So we invested a lot into the compute.”
This super computer will contain a lot of data that will come from the fleet and eventually help in making the system better.
Furthermore, Karparty said, it’s a massive computer and in terms of flops, it would be roughly the world’s number five supercomputer.
A More Powerful Computer Is Coming Soon
It seems a more powerful supercomputer is under construction. For the past few years, Tesla has been working on Dojo Supercomputer. Dojo will be a successor to the above-mentioned supercomputer.
If we believe the sources, the Dojo Supercomputer will be capable of one quintillion (1018) floating-point operations per second, or 1,000 petaFLOPS.
According to Elon Musk, this supercomputer will hopefully be ready by the end of this year. However, now that the automaker has just launched a new supercomputer, we are a bit skeptical if Tesla will meet the said timeline.
