Time to read: 4 minutes | Published: March 03, 2025
AI supercomputing What is AI supercomputing?
AI supercomputing is when organizations use ultrafast processors made up of hundreds of thousands of powerful machines to manage and interpret vast quantities of data using artificial intelligence (AI) models.
- How do AI supercomputers work?
- AI supercomputing and analytics workloads
- Examples of AI supercomputers
- HPE and AI supercomputing
How do AI supercomputers work?
AI supercomputers are typically made up of finely tuned hardware consisting of hundreds of thousands of processors, a specialized network, and a huge amount of storage.
The supercomputers divide workloads into different processors, so that each processor has a small piece of the work. As they run their individual parts of the work, the processors communicate with each other, often quite frequently. Each processor sends a message through a communication grid, so that the information is exchanged in many dimensions; up, down, left, right, back and forth, depending on the problem. This multi-dimensional process helps to keep workloads better tuned to each other, enabling greater processing speed.
Surprisingly, AI supercomputers run fairly ordinary operating systems, using Linux software to run the applications, network, and scheduling. The analytics programs being run are usually written in C or Fortran, passing messages through a communications library called MPI, which can be used on more than one machine.
With smaller circuits packed densely in the circuit boards, an AI supercomputer can run faster, but it also runs hotter. That’s because getting sufficient power into and out of a chip isn’t efficient enough yet, so the chips get very hot. But with hundreds of thousands of these multi-core nodes together, supercomputers have huge cooling needs. To mitigate that, the circuits are made with copper wires because they can transfer energy with very high power density. The supercomputer also uses forced air to dissipate heat and circulates refrigerants as well through the entire system.
