“Accelerated computing and AI have arrived, and just in time.” Thus spake Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder and CEO in announcing a new collaborative effort with AWS to build out “the world's most scalable, on-demand artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure optimized for training increasingly complex large language models (LLMs) and developing generative AI applications.”

Generative is here to stay, and AWS clearly wants to maintain leadership in the cloud computing that will power it.

The new agreement involves Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P5 instances powered by Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs, to deliver up to 20 exaFLOPS of compute performance for building and training the largest deep-learning models, according to Nvidia. P5 instances will be the first GPU-based instance to take advantage of AWS’s second-generation Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) networking, according to the company, to provide 3,200 Gbps of low-latency, high bandwidth networking throughput.

For his part, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said, “With second-generation EFA, customers will be able to scale their P5 instances to over 20,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, bringing supercomputer capabilities on demand to customers ranging from startups to large enterprises.”

EC2 P5 instances are deployed in hyperscale clusters called EC2 UltraClusters that are comprised of the highest performance compute, networking, and storage in the cloud. “Each EC2 UltraCluster is one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world,” according to AWS. P5 instances feature eight Nvidia H100 GPUs capable of 16 petaFLOPs of mixed-precision performance, 640 GB of high-bandwidth memory, and 3,200 Gbps networking connectivity – 8x more than the previous generation – in a single EC2 instance.

The supercomputer-on-a-laptop has arrived.