AI hardware-as-a-service company SambaNova Systems will deploy one of its supercomputers at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) in Japan.

The DataScale system will be paired with Fugaku, the world's second fastest supercomputer.

“The provision of SambaNova’s system resources to R-CCS provides a new option for accelerating the integration of HPC simulations and AI with Fugaku,” Professor Satoshi Matsuoka, director of R-CCS, said.

“The new SambaNova system will boost research into the convergence of HPC and AI, including ultra-high-resolution computer vision for building a digital twin for the Society 5.0 era.”

R-CCS researchers will use DataScale to develop surrogate models to improve the accuracy of ultra-high-resolution 3D computer vision, including for the inspection of social infrastructure such as highways, and to process ultra-high-resolution image datasets.

While Fugaku uses 152,064 Fujitsu’s 48-core Arm-based A64FX processor chips, SambaNova has developed its own Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU) chip, which is only available within the wider DataScale package. The company claims that developing a single hardware and software package optimizes it for AI workloads.

It previously paired a DataScale system with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Corona supercomputer, and another one of its systems is being tested by Argonne National Laboratory.