NVIDIA has announced that Thailand’s National Science and  Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) will be harnessing the power of NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core  GPUs for its new supercomputer. With 704 A100 GPUs, the new public high performance computing  system will be Southeast Asia’s biggest. 

Running at 30x faster than the current TARA system, the new supercomputer will be hosted in the  NSTDA Supercomputer Center (ThaiSC) to drive research by engineers as well as computational and data  scientists from academia, government and industry sectors across Thailand. It will support research  projects in areas such as pharmaceuticals, renewable energy and weather forecasting. 

NVIDIA A100 GPUs will form the engine of the new supercomputer to accelerate AI, data analytics and  HPC. Representing the most powerful end-to-end AI and HPC platform for data centres, they will boost  data-intensive simulations and accelerate AI in HPC applications.  

“The new supercomputer at NSTDA will expand and enhance research in Thailand, speeding up the  development of breakthroughs that benefit individuals and industries in the country,” said Dennis Ang,  senior director, enterprise business, SEA and ANZ region, Worldwide Field Operations, NVIDIA. “NVIDIA  A100 incorporates building blocks across hardware, networking, software, libraries, optimised AI models  and applications to enable extreme performance for AI and HPC.” 

“The supercomputer, which is expected to start operations by the end of 2022, is important for Thailand in  terms of national disaster predictions and forecasts,” said Anek Laothamatas, minister of MHESI.  

“The supercomputer will strengthen Thailand’s position in HPC and research capabilities in ASEAN,” said  Narong Sirilertworakul, president of NSTDA.  

The new supercomputer will enable researchers to benefit from real-world results and the ability to deploy  solutions into production at scale.  

“We chose NVIDIA A100 because it is currently the leading solution for HPC-AI in the market. Even more  important is that many HPC-AI software applications are well supported by NVIDIA technology, and the list  will keep growing,” said Manaschai Kunaseth, chief of operations, ThaiSC. 

ThaiSC’s users are looking forward to the additional power of the new supercomputer, which will let them  scale up their research projects once it becomes operational in the second half of 2022. This new  supercomputer will accelerate innovation for Thailand’s efforts in medicine, energy sources, weather  forecasting and more with advanced modeling, simulation, AI, and analytics capabilities. 

Kwanchiva Thangthai, of the National Electronics and Computer Technology Center’s Speech and Text  Understanding Team, expects to see massive efficiency gains in speech recognition research pipelines. “We  can gain competitive performance and provide a free-of-charge Thai speech-to-text service for everyone via  AIForThai,” she said. 

In May, NSTDA became the first organisation in Thailand to install an NVIDIA DGX™ A100 system with  NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking and the first in Southeast Asia to use the NVIDIA Clara™ Parabricks®  sequencing analysis software, which enabled the National Biobank of Thailand to accelerate genomic  sequencing efforts, including a genome study to combat COVID-19. 

“NVIDIA GPUs are the core of our molecular dynamics simulation platform. We are inspired by the ability to  apply this technology to elucidate the behaviour of protein-ligand binding,” said Thanyada Rungrotmongkol  of Chulalongkorn University’s Structural and Computational Biology Research Unit. “In addition, the power  of NVIDIA GPUs hastens the research to find inhibitors against the coronavirus.”