This Wednesday, NVIDIA has announced that they have shipped their first commercial Volta-based DGX-1 system to the MGH & BWH Center for Clinical Data Science (CCDS), a Massachusetts-based research group focusing on AI and machine learning applications in healthcare. In a sense, this serves as a generational upgrade as CCDS was one of the first research institutions to receive a Pascal-based first generation DGX-1 last December. In addition, NVIDIA is shipping a DGX Station to CCDS later this month.

At CCDS, these AI supercomputers will continue to be used in training deep neural networks for the purpose of evaluating medical images and scans, using Massachusetts General Hospital’s collection of phenotypic, genetics, and imaging data. In turn, this can assist doctors and medical practitioners in making faster and more accurate diagnoses and treatment plans.

First announced at GTC 2017, the DGX-1V server is powered by 8 Tesla V100s and priced at $149,000. The original iteration of the DGX-1 was priced at $129,000 with a 2P 16-core Haswell-EP configuration, but has since been updated to the same 20-core Broadwell-EP CPUs found in the DGX-1V, allowing for easy P100 to V100 drop-in upgrades. As for the DGX Station, this was also unveiled at GTC 2017, and is essentially a full tower workstation 1P version of the DGX-1 with 4 Tesla V100s. This water cooled DGX Station is priced at $69,000.

Selected NVIDIA DGX Systems Specifications
  DGX-1
(Volta)
DGX-1
(Pascal)
DGX-1
(Pascal, Original)
DGX Station
GPU Configuration 8x Tesla V100 8x Tesla P100 4x Tesla V100
GPU FP16 Compute General Purpose 240 TFLOPS 170 TFLOPS 120 TFLOPS
 
Deep Learning 960 TFLOPS 480 TFLOPS
CPU Configuration 2x Intel Xeon E5-2698 v4
(20-core, Broadwell-EP)
2x Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3
(16 core, Haswell-EP)
1x Intel Xeon E5-2698 v4
(20-core, Broadwell-EP)
System Memory 512 GB DDR4-2133
(LRDIMM)
256 GB DDR4
(LRDIMM)
Total GPU Memory 128 GB HBM2
(8x 16GB)
64 GB HBM2
(4x 16GB)
Storage 4x 1.92 TB SSD RAID 0 OS: 1x 1.92 TB SSD

Data: 3x 1.92 TB SSD RAID 0
Networking Dual 10GbE
4 InfiniBand EDR
Dual 10Gb LAN
Max Power 3200W 1500W
Dimensions 866mm x 444mm x 131mm
(3U Rackmount)
518mm x 256mm x 639mm
(Tower)
Other Features Ubuntu Linux Host OS

DGX Software Stack (see Datasheet)
Ubuntu Desktop Linux OS

DGX Software Stack (see Datasheet)

3x DisplayPort
Price $149,000 Varies $129,000 $69,000

Taking a step back, this is a continuation of NVIDIA’s rollout of Volta-based professional/server products, with DGX Volta meeting its Q3 launch date, and OEM Volta targeted at Q4. In the past months, the first Tesla V100 GPU accelerators were given out to researchers at the 2017 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in July, while a PCIe version of the Tesla V100 was formally announced during ISC 2017 in June.

Source: NVIDIA

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  • Yojimbo - Thursday, September 7, 2017 - link

    You'll have to ask them what they'll do. I assume they will sell it on the open market just like any other good or service. They are spending money to develop a system that they think people will find valuable. That is, it will be cheaper and/or higher quality than current methods. So I am guessing that any interested medical institution would have to pay for the use of the trained neural network just like they'd have to pay for the use of a trained doctor or medical billing software. I'm not sure why you think this labor and enterprise would be "greedy" for looking for a return on their investment.
  • MrSpadge - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    Using the trained networks will definitely require a lot less number crunching power - depending on how many images and at what resolution are needed. This will probably still require modern GPUs, but not 8xGV100.
  • gfkBill - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    Obligatory Ethereum mining reference - that's about the equivalent of 140 GTX1060's in memory bandwidth. But at a cost of about 4x buying that many 1060's :)
  • Ironchef3500 - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    holy shit
  • sparkuss - Friday, September 8, 2017 - link

    I just enjoy the picture composition,

    ......with orders of magnitude of computational power in hand, the stalwart whiteboard keeps watch, proud in knowing it still is needed to keep the world on track.
  • dagnamit - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link

    Yes, but can it run Crysis?
  • Zingam - Thursday, September 14, 2017 - link

    No!
  • fmttech - Sunday, July 29, 2018 - link

    looks like NVIDIA DGX is breakthrough technology looking forward to what's next. https://www.future-micro.ca

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