IBM’s new AI-friendly server adopts Nvidia’s NVLink for faster memory

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Under the hood of the new IBM Power Systems S822LC for High Performance Computing
GPUs are a proven way to speed up the time-consuming task of machine learning, a crucial element of the recent rapid expansion of the use of AI solutions in many industries. The result has been an explosively-growing new market for GPU vendors Nvidia and AMD. IBM’s newly announced Power Systems S822LC aims to push machine learning performance even further — with two IBM POWER8 CPUs and four Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs.
However, no matter how fast a GPU is, the large data requirements of AI applications means that memory access and inter-processor communications can quickly become a bottleneck. So IBM is also using Nvidia’s proprietary NVLink interconnect technology to address that problem.
The S822LC is slated to deliver 21 teraflops of half-precision operations; machine learning typically doesn’t need full or double precision for training neural networks, for example. Customers can also attach additional Tesla K80 GPUs over a more traditional PCIe bus.