Natural language processing (NLP) requires loads of computing power so research lab VinAI has turned to the new NVIDIA DGX A100 system — making it the first in Vietnam and one of the first in Southeast Asia to deploy the newly-launched GPU-accelerated data centre in a box.
Announced last week, the NVIDIA DGX A100 is a perfect match for training language, image and video models, as well as other ambitious projects VinAI has that utilise a large amount of GPU power and high-speed interconnect technology. And the new system certainly has the necessary grunt — five petaflops of AI computing power and eight NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs.
The research lab aims to advance understanding of the fundamentals in machine learning and deep learning and to investigate how they enable new AI methods in computer vision and natural language understanding.
VinAI will focus on the development of new AI applications, especially those that help enable more natural human interaction with machines through voices, gestures, behaviours, and biometrics, or from smart sensors and devices.
Tackling overlooked problems
From its strategic location in Southeast Asia, VinAI is drawn towards major problems in developing countries that might otherwise be overlooked in the research community.
It has contributed to the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic by automatically analysing tweets for COVID-19 events and enabling face recognition of people donning face masks.
VinAI wanted to expand its NVIDIA DGX-1 cluster to improve its scale and performance, especially for training large Vietnamese language models. The NVIDIA DGX A100 is the ideal solution for powering today’s most challenging AI workloads, from training to inference to data analytics.
“Our lab’s utilisation is always maxed out at 100 percent so the new DGX A100 system will give our team the compute power to tackle our most complex problems. Our medical imaging team is also using NVIDIA Clara for a few tasks so we are also hoping some of our work can be pushed upstream,” said Dr Bui Hai Hung, Director of VinAI.
Around 70 research scientists, residents and engineers will be relying on the new AI system, which will be part of VinAI’s NVIDIA DGX cluster. This number is expected to double by the end of this year
“The new NVIDIA DGX A100 will empower VinAI to optimise computing power and resources to accelerate diverse workloads and scale with ease as its needs increase. We will work closely with VinAI on an architecture level and from a developer’s perspective to ensure success and leadership across their AI projects,” said Dennis Ang, Director, Enterprise Business, SEA and ANZ Region at NVIDIA
Entelechy Asia 