Amazon, Google to compete for Israel’s supercomputer tender

Two years after the Israel Innovation Authority began its national AI programme, it is now close to purchasing a supercomputer from one of the Israeli government’s national cloud suppliers – Amazon and Google. The budget for building the supercomputer is NIS 300 million, of which NIS 150 million will be allocated to the Innovation Authority’s management budget and another NIS 150 million to fund the technology giant that wins the bid.

A supercomputer is actually a large structure of standard computer servers that are connected to each other by communication cables and work together. The goal is to perform large calculations that regular computers cannot do, such as simulating the activity of molecules during drug development. Recently, supercomputers have also been used for artificial intelligence applications and are used to train or operate language models for companies.

Training language models actually allows any organization to implement capabilities from the worlds of ChatGPT or Cloud chat engines. In this way a technology company can build, for example, a customer service engine that adapts to its products and data, and an academic research laboratory can allow researchers to ask questions about the information in its databases and receive intelligent answers.

The supercomputer to be built will be relatively small compared to typical national supercomputers in other Western countries, but sufficient to meet local needs. Designed for use by Israeli technology companies and academia, it will contain between 1,000 and 2,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processors. The purpose of the national supercomputer will be to train language models for use in the technology industry and academia.

National plan

The main reason for the delay in building the supercomputer was that it was initially under the responsibility of the Ministry of Defence’s Directorate of Research and Development (DDR&D) (MAFAT), which was not quick to initiate the project, and when war broke out outside, the matter fell in the order of priority. The Innovation Authority, which coordinates the National Artificial Intelligence Programme, rescued the supercomputer project from the Ministry of Defence.

The National AI Plan is a strategic plan formed by former chief scientist, Dr. Orna Berry, now a senior executive at Google Israel, to develop regulatory policy and finance national projects in this field. A budget of NIS 1 billion was allocated to the strategic plan, which was presented in 2020, distributed in two phases between 2022 and 2027. Areas of activity in the plan include supporting the development of linguistic models in Hebrew and Arabic, developing medical databases and developing a high-speed computer, establishing an independent institute for artificial intelligence research and computing for government ministries.

In addition to the supercomputer for training linguistic models, the program operates two additional supercomputing laboratories. One is a lab for chip companies interested in running tests in a supercomputer environment in collaboration with Israeli chip company NextSilicon, and the other is a scientific computing service designed to run mathematical models that require core processors (CPUs), rather than graphics processors. This service will be run remotely from a European server by connecting to the EU supercomputer project, and will be hosted in a country friendly to Israel – most likely Germany.

The National Directorate for Artificial Intelligence at the Israel Innovation Authority is currently being challenged by the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Finance, which want to create a national directorate within the Prime Minister’s Office. The plan will see budget management transferred from the Innovation Authority and the Inter-Ministerial Forum.

Published by Globes, Israel Business News – en.globes.co.il – on November 11, 2024.

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