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NVIDIA announced Thailand’s first implementation of the new NVIDIA DGX A100™ system at Chulalongkorn University. As part of the country’s Thailand 4.0 initiative, the system will help Chulalongkorn University Technology Center (UTC) to research and develop innovations to create an innovation-led, value-based economy.

As the technology arm of Thailand’s top university, UTC plans to use the five-petaflop AI system to power the increasing number of AI and data-driven research projects and innovations and to meet the high demand for AI training systems.

“We were looking for the best-in-class GPU training system of the highest performance to train AI models from large volumes of data, which include high-resolution images, in the shortest time,” said Prof Yingyos Avihingsanon, director, Chulalongkorn UTC. “Furthermore, for easy maintenance, the GPU-based system needed to have an assistive software to optimise the GPU as well as a simple management tool. The hardware and software must be able to integrate with and connect to our existing IT infrastructure easily.”

UTC was established to address the so-called “valley of death” – the gap between university research and intellectual property and working applications with commercial value. To identify the most promising deep tech research areas for development and commercialisation, the centre works closely with faculty, students, industry and government to solve the nation’s biggest challenges.

Under the Thailand 4.0 initiative, the centre is currently focusing on coming up with AI innovations which has identified one of five main growth sectors as digital technologies, the Internet of Things, AI and embedded technology. Its core research includes natural language processing for the Thai language, image processing and reinforcement learning.

Another focus area is medical technology, which is in high demand as Thailand has Asia’s third most rapidly aging population, with one in four people being over 60 years old by 2030.

“Our projects demand higher processing power in a shorter amount of time as we have large volumes of images and datasets. With the new NVIDIA DGX A100, we hope to achieve breakthrough AI-driven research and innovations,” said Asst Prof Natawut Nupairoj, director, AI and data science, Chulalongkorn UTC.

Accelerated data centre in a box

The NVIDIA DGX A100 is a five-petaflop accelerated data centre in a box that provides the power and performance needed for AI researchers. It packs eight NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs based on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture, to provide 320GB of memory for training large AI datasets, inference and data analytics workloads. Using multi-instance GPU technology, multiple smaller workloads can be supported by partitioning the DGX A100 into as many as 56 instances. In combination with integrated high-speed

NVIDIA® Mellanox® HDR networking interconnects, the DGX A100 delivers an elastic infrastructure for research centres.

“By unifying support for AI analytics, training and inference on one platform and by boosting performance up to 20x over its predecessors, the NVIDIA DGX A100 will provide the computing resources and high performance that Chulalongkorn UTC needs to drive its research. The Chulalongkorn UTC DGX A100 deployment builds on NVIDIA’s close relationship with the university through a joint-lab that works on industry-oriented AI research projects and a node as part of our NVIDIA AI Technology Centre network,” said Dennis Ang, Director, Enterprise Business, SEA and ANZ Region at NVIDIA.

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