Affordable Deep Learning Training with Intel Habana Gaudi

Sree Ganesan, Head of Software Products for Habana Labs, introduces Habana Gaudi, an Intel company building purpose-built AI accelerators. Habana’s Gaudi is an affordable deep learning training accelerator available in the cloud with AWS EC2 DL1 and on-premises in a solution with Supermicro X12 Gaudi Server and DDN AI 400X2 storage. Since cost is the most significant challenge to implementing AI and ML solutions, Habana Labs focused on an optimized AI training solution when developing Gaudi, focused on homogeneous compute, software-managed HBM2 memory, and integrated 100Gb Ethernet RoCE.

Saudi-based Amazon AWS EC2 DL1 training instances offer 60% lower cost than EC2 P4d instances with ECS and EKS container support. Saudi’s SynapseAI software suite optimizes performance and usability of the Gaudi for PyTorch and TensorFlow users. Habana is also working with partners like Hugging Face, PyTorch Lightning, and cnvrg.io to maximize developer efficiency.

Habana’s Gaudi 2 was recently announced at Intel Vision and will be available in Q3 of 2022. Habana promises that Gaudi 2 offers 2x better throughput vs. NVIDIA’s A100 for popular vision and language models.