Pointers at Glance
- The purpose-built AI supercomputer of Tesla ‘Dojo’ is so powerful that it tripped the power grid.
- The Dojo was launched at Tesla’s annual AI Day in 2021, but the project was still in its infancy.
- At AI Day 2022, Tesla unveiled its progress with over the year.
The supercomputer has changed from just a chip and training tiles into a full cabinet. Tesla claims it can replace six GPU boxes with a single Dojo tile, which it says is cheaper than one GPU box.
There are six Dojo tiles per tray. Tesla says that each tray is equal to three to four full-loaded supercomputer racks. Two trays can fit in one Dojo cabinet with a host assembly. Such a supercomputer naturally has a huge power draw. It needs so much power that it managed to trip the grid in Palo Alto.
Bill Chang, Tesla’s Principal System Engineer for Dojo, said that earlier this year, they started load testing the power and cooling infrastructure. They were able to push it over 2 MW before they tripped the substation and got a call from the city.
Tesla had to build custom infrastructure with its high-powered cooling and power system to function. An ‘ExaPOD’ consisting of a few Dojo cabinets has the following specifications:
- 1.1 EFLOP
- 1.3TB SRAM
- 13TB DRAM
Currently, seven ExaPODs are planned to be housed in Palo Alto. The Dojo is purpose-built for AI and will greatly improve the ability of Tesla to train neural nets using video data from its vehicles. These neural nets will be important for Tesla’s self-driving efforts and its humanoid robot ‘Optimus,’ which also appeared during this year’s event.
About Optimus
Optimus was also first launched last year and was even more in its infancy than Dojo. While Optimus still has a long way to go before it can do the shopping and carry out dangerous manual labor tasks, as Tesla envisions, it saw a working robot prototype at AI Day 2022.
Optimus’s details are still unclear at the moment, but at least there is more certainty around the Dojo supercomputer.
