Market & Policy

Japan Boosts AI Power with NVIDIA Supercomputer Upgrade

by Philip Lee

Updated July 22, 2024

Japan Boosts AI Power with NVIDIA Supercomputer Upgrade — The ABCI 3.0 supercomputer will be housed in Kashiwa at a facility run by Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. Credit: Courtesy of National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.

Tokyo, Japan - National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) will integrate thousands of NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs into its new supercomputer to enhance the country's artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

The AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure 3.0 supercomputer (ABCI 3.0) will be built using a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Cray XD system featuring NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking.

ABCI 3.0 is expected to provide 6 AI exaflops of computing capacity and 410 double-precision petaflops of general computing capacity.

The system is slated to come online by the end of this year.

The project is part of a broader $1 billion initiative by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) to strengthen the country's AI computing resources.

NVIDIA H200 GPUs in the system are 15 times more energy-efficient than ABCI's previous-generation architecture for AI workloads such as large language model token generation, according to NVIDIA.

AIST Executive Officer Yoshio Tanaka said the upgrade aims to advance research and development capabilities for generative AI in Japan.

The supercomputer will be housed in a facility run by AIST in Kashiwa, near Tokyo.