AWS X Nvidia?: Accelerating AI

Introduction

During the GTC 2024 Conference, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang revealed a strategic partnership with AWS. This partnership will empower AWS with NVIDIA’s latest supercomputing powerhouse, the NVIDIA’s cutting-edge GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip and B100 Tensor Core GPUs, to leverage the power of NVIDIA’s latest technology for accelerated AI workloads. So how it started and how will AWS leverage this computational power within its services?

History

The partnership between Nvidia and Amazon Web Services (AWS) began over a decade ago, around 2010. Their collaboration has been focused on delivering large-scale, cost-effective, and flexible GPU-accelerated solutions for various applications, including AI/ML, graphics, gaming, and high-performance computing. This relationship was officially initiated when AWS became the first cloud service provider to offer NVIDIA GPUs, launching the world’s first GPU cloud instance on AWS. This milestone set the stage for a series of advancements in GPU-based solutions and AI infrastructure.

AWS computing advancement with?Nvidia

Over time, AWS has benefit form its partnership with NVIDIA and significantly advanced its computing capabilities. This collaboration has led to the development of a wide range of GPU-accelerated instances on Amazon EC2, empowering customers to tackle complex computational tasks across various domains.

• High-Performance Computing (HPC)
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML)
• Graphics and Visual Computing

This could not be a reality without the evolution of AWS services for AI/ML applications over the years.

Early Years (2010s):

?Amazon EC2 P2 <=> NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs?

Mid-2010s:

Amazon EC2 P3 <=> NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs?

Late 2010s:

?Amazon EC2 G4 <=> NVIDIA T4 GPUs

Early 2020s:

?Amazon EC2 P4 <=> NVIDIA A100 GPUs?

In 2023:

Amazon EC2 P5 <=> NVIDIA H100 GPUs

In 2024:

?Amazon EC2 P5e <=> NVIDIA H200 GPUs

Best of AWS, EC2 P5 &?P5e

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced its EC2 P5 and P5e instances, setting new benchmarks for high-performance computing (HPC), machine learning (ML), and AI workloads. These instances are built on cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs? ?H100 for the P5 and the newly launched H200 for the P5e? delivering unprecedented performance for demanding computational tasks.

Performance and Use?Cases

The EC2 P5 and P5e instances provide a significant leap in performance compared to their predecessors. They are designed for highly parallelizable workloads, including:

• AI model training and inference at large scales.
• HPC applications, such as weather modeling, genomics, and computational fluid dynamics.
• Big data analytics and real-time video processing.

Both instances leverage AWS’s ultra-low-latency networking and high-speed interconnects, making them ideal for workloads requiring vast GPU-to-GPU communication.

Underlying GPUs: NVIDIA H100 and?H200

The NVIDIA H100 and H200 GPUs represent the pinnacle of GPU innovation, both built on the Hopper architecture, but the H200 takes it even further.

NVIDIA H100 GPU (Powering EC2 P5 Instances)

• Hopper Architecture: Optimized for transformer models, foundational to modern AI.
• Tensor Core Performance: Up to 60 teraflops (TFLOPs) of FP64 performance and over 1,000 TFLOPs for AI workloads using mixed precision.
• Memory: 80 GB of HBM3, enabling ultra-high bandwidth for memory-intensive computations.
• NVLink Support: Ensures high-speed communication between GPUs, critical for multi-GPU setups in training large AI models.

The H100 GPU is a powerhouse for training massive AI models like GPT and fine-tuning foundation models, delivering 3x the performance of the previous-generation NVIDIA A100 GPU.

NVIDIA H200 GPU (Powering EC2 P5e Instances)

• Advancements Over H100: The H200 offers even higher memory bandwidth, enhanced tensor core performance, and improved scalability for larger AI models.
• Higher Bandwidth: The H200 leverages HBM3e memory, surpassing the already impressive 3 TB/s bandwidth of the H100.
• Improved Latency: Tailored for next-gen applications like GPT-5 training or billion-parameter simulations, the H200 reduces bottlenecks in latency-sensitive operations.
• Enhanced NVSwitch: A more efficient communication fabric, optimizing multi-GPU configurations for massive-scale model training.

The H200 GPU provides a seamless upgrade for workloads that require the highest computational efficiency and throughput.

Conclusion

AWS’s enduring partnership with NVIDIA has been pivotal in shaping the future of high-performance computing on the cloud. This collaboration has culminated in groundbreaking advancements such as the EC2 P5 and P5e instances, powered by NVIDIA’s state-of-the-art H100 and H200 GPUs. These offerings epitomize the synergy between AWS’s scalable infrastructure and NVIDIA’s cutting-edge GPU technology, enabling organizations to address increasingly complex computational challenges in AI, machine learning, and HPC. As AWS continues to innovate with NVIDIA, customers gain access to unparalleled computational power, paving the way for breakthroughs in science, technology, and enterprise.