Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer is so powerful that it was able to trip the power grid in Palo Alto. The dojo is Tesla’s supercomputer platform that is built from the ground up for AI machine learning. It is especially focused on video training from the data that Tesla gets from its autopilot vehicles.
Tesla has signed a large NVIDIA GPU-based supercomputer that is one of the most powerful in the world, but the new Dojo custom-built computer is using chips and an entire infrastructure designed by Tesla. The supercomputer is a custom build, it is expected to elevate Tesla’s capacity to train neural nets using video data, which is critical to its computer vision technology powering its self-driving effort.
In 2021, at Tesla’s AI Day, the company unveiled its Dojo supercomputer, but the company was still ramping up its effort at the time. It only had its first chip and training tiles, and it was still working on building a full Dojo cabinet and cluster or “Exapod.” Now Tesla has unveiled the progress made with the Dojo program over the last year during its AI Day 2022 last night. The company confirmed that it managed to go from a chip and tile to now a system tray and a full cabinet.
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Tesla stated that it managed to go from a chip and tile to now a system tray and a full cabinet. The company claims it can replace 6 GPU boxes with a single Dojo tile, which the company claims costs less than one GPU box. There are 6 of those tiles per tray. Tesla says that a single tray is an equivalent of “3 to 4 fully-loaded supercomputer racks”. They are integrating its host interface directly on the system tray to create a big full host assembly. Tesla can fit two of these system trays with host assembly into a single Dojo cabinet.
Bill Chang, Tesla’s Principal System Engineer for Dojo, said “We knew that we had to reexamine every aspect of the data center infrastructure in order to support our unprecedented cooling and power density.” They had to develop their own high-powered cooling and power system to power the Dojo cabinets. Chang said that Tesla tripped their local electric grid’s substation when testing the infrastructure earlier this year. “Earlier this year, we started load testing our power and cooling infrastructure and we were able to push it over 2 MW before we tripped our substation and got a call from the city.”