NVIDIA Volta-Powered DGX-1 And DGX Station AI Supercomputers Debut At GTC 2017

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, May 10, 2017, 11:39 PM EDT

Soon after unveiling the Tesla V100 data center GPU based on its next-generation Volta architecture at GTC 2017, NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun Huang announced an updated, Volta-infused DGX-1 server appliance for deep learning data center deployment, along with a totally new product, the NVIDIA DGX Station, that’s being dubbed a ‘Personal AI Supercomputer’.

The new NVIDIA DGX-1 is similar to the previous generation offering based on Pascal, but is powered by eight Tesla V100s GPUs, linked together via next-gen NVIDIA NVLink interconnect technology that ups the bandwidth per GPU to 300GB/s. The rest of the system consists of dual, 20-core Intel Xeon E5-2698 CPUs, 512GB of RAM, four 1.92TB SSDs in RAID 0, and a pair of 10GbE connections.

There are a total of 40,960 CUDA cores (5,120 Tensor cores) in the system, with 128GB of total GPU memory, spread across those Tesla V100 processors. All told, the Volta-infused DGX-1 offers up to 960 TFLOPs of FP16 compute performance, versus 170 TFLOPs for the original, with significantly more bandwidth on tap.

The new DGX-1 is priced at $149,000, and will be delivered in Q3. Customers who buy one today, can receive the Pascal-based version, and have the Tesla P100s swapped for V100s when they become available.

NVIDIA also unveiled the new DGX Station. The DGX Station is designed to be a quiet, standalone AI workstation, and features up to four Tesla V100 16GB cards, for a total of 20,480 CUDA cores and 2,560 Tensor cores.

The system offers up to 480 TFLOPS of compute performance (half of the DGX-1) and also packs a 20-core Xeon E5-2698 v4 CPU, 256GB of system memory, quad 1.92TB SSDs (one for the OS, and 3 in RAID 0 for data storage). The systems are water cooled and function within a 1500W envelope, so companies that don’t necessarily have access to environmentally controlled data centers, can work with bleeding edge AI and Deep Learning applications, employing this as a personal workstation specifically tasked for these kinds of workloads.

The NVIDIA DGX Station is priced at $69,000, and will also begin shipping in Q3.

Tags: GPU, Tesla, Volta, (nasdaq:nvda), dgx-1, gtc2017, tesla v100, dgx station

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com