From MIPS to exaflops in mere decades: Compute power is exploding, and it will transform AI

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More At the recent Nvidia GTC conference, the company unveiled what it described as the first single-rack system of servers capable of one exaflop — one billion billion, or a quintillion, floating-point operations (FLOPS) per second. This breakthrough is based on the latest GB200 NVL72 system, which incorporates Nvidia’s latest Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs). A standard computer rack is about 6 feet tall, a little more than 3 feet deep and less than 2 feet wide. Shrinking an exaflop: From Frontier to Blackwell A couple of things about the announcement struck me. First, the world’s first exaflop-capable computer was installed only a few years ago, in 2022, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For comparison, the “Frontier” supercomputer built by HPE and powered by AMD GPUs and CPUs, originally consisted of 74 racks of servers. The new Nvidia system has ac ... Read full article.