The latest adopter of the Nvidia DGX SuperPOD, the company’s turnkey AI supercomputing infrastructure, is a non-profit organization looking to help the U.S. government follow through on its ambition to leverage generative AI for advances in climate science, healthcare, and cybersecurity.
The Mitre Corporation, which operates federally-funded research and development centers on behalf of U.S. government and military agencies, is implementing a DGX SuperPod to support its Federal AI Sandbox, a $20 million program to improve experimentation with next-generation, AI-enabled applications across federal government agencies.
The Mitre announcement follows news of other parties implementing the DGX SuperPod, including banking giant BNY Mellon and Denmark’s Novo Nordisk Foundation. In addition to these adopters, Equinix recently said it would support a managed private AI service for enterprises via the DGX SuperPod.
Mitre’s move also comes a little more than six months after the Biden Administration issued its “Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworth Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,” a document that sparked a flurry of AI budgeting activity, strategizing, and policy positioning by federal government agencies.
“The recent executive order on AI encourages federal agencies to reduce barriers for AI adoptions, but agencies often lack the computing environment necessary for experimentation and prototyping,” said Charles Clancy, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Mitre, in a statement. “Our new Federal AI Sandbox will help level the playing field, making the high-quality compute power needed to train and test custom AI solutions available to any agency.”
Nvidia said the DGX SuperPod is capable of an exaflop of 8-bit AI compute, meaning it performs a quintillion math operation each second to train and deploy custom LLMs and other AI solutions at scale, which will help the Federal AI Sandbox will deliver enough compute for its constituents to train large language models and other generative AI tools to develop cutting-edge applications.
“Mitre’s purchase of a DGX SuperPOD will help turbocharge the U.S. federal government’s development of its AI initiatives,” said Anthony Robbins, vice president of public sector at Nvidia. “AI has enormous potential to improve government services for citizens and solve big challenges, like transportation and cybersecurity.”
Mitre’s announcement was not the only bit of AI news involving Nvidia this week. Red Hat announced it is integrating Nvidia NIM AI inference microservices into its OpenShift AI platform, and Palo Alto Networks announced a reference architecture for AI runtime security also incorporating Nvidia NIM.