Thailand’s CMKL University has reached an agreement with IT hardware giant NVIDIA to drive artificial intelligence growth through NVIDIA’s DGX POD.
CMKL University will set up an AI computing cluster and an AI analytics platform to support data exchange and competency building in Thailand.
“NVIDIA DGX POD delivers groundbreaking performance that is designed to accelerate diverse AI training, inference and data science workloads. It will help accelerate CMKL University’s research to develop solutions that will benefit not just Thailand but also Southeast Asia and the world,” said Dennis Ang, Director of Enterprise Business for the SEA and ANZ Region at NVIDIA.
Established as a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University and King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, CMKL University provides cutting-edge engineering research and education in Southeast Asia.
“The platform that we are developing will allow researchers to store and manage their datasets with ease. They will be able to exchange their data with other researchers, and utilise the cloud HPC infrastructure to run machine learning codes and models at lightning speeds,” said Akkarit Sangpetch, CMKM Program Director (Thailand) at CMKL University.
The university’s new infrastructure will be modelled after NVIDIA’s DGX POD design and consists of six NVIDIA GDX A100 AI systems delivering 30 petaflops of AI processing power, as well as a range of the company’s other products such as NVIDIA Cumulus networking software, NVIDIA Mellanox Spectrum 100GbE and Quantum 200Gbps InfiniBand smart switches.
The system will deliver up to a 20x performance boost, which is greatly beneficial for AI projects such as automated speech recognition research that needs to collect and process 1,000 hours of voice input, and a bottle recycling model that contains 600,000 high-resolution images.
“This platform will accelerate AI work in various research and development fields to create substantial positive impacts on society. Examples are an increase in quality of life in cities through better management and logistics; better optimization of circular infrastructure, consumer insights, and biomedical research; and an increase in the quality and quantity of crop yields countrywide,” said Mr. Sangpetch.
Backing the project is Thailand’s Office of National Higher Education Science Research and Innovation Policy Council (NXPO), an autonomous public agency affiliated to the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation.
NXPO looks to increase Thailand’s growth and level of competitiveness, and enhance its socioeconomic sustainability through technology and innovation strategic plans.
The Program Management Unit for Thailand’s Competitiveness will also be involved in providing the funding and support for this world-class research and initiative.
“Together with CMKL University and the new AI Infrastructure, the office looks forward to developing resilient economies in the age of AI,” said NXPO.
Aside from NVIDIA’s DGX POD, CMKL University also plans to use NVIDIA’s Jetson AGX Xavier and Jetson Nano, and is considering an extended cloud-edge processing model.
The plan is to make NVIDIA’s hardware central computing nodes that connect to research and university nodes across the country.
Earlier this year, Vietnam’s first artificial intelligence research lab, VinAI Research, claimed to be the first in Southeast Asia to deploy the newly-launched NVIDIA DGX A100 data center solution.
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Image credit: Reuters
