TAIWANIA 2 – the fastest supercomputer in Taiwan and 20th fastest in the world – is now open for business.

The first “made in Taiwan” AI supercomputer, TAIWANIA 2 is a milestone in Taiwan’s promotion of AI as a core tenet of its future development and will be used by academic and research communities at the Taiwan Computing Cloud in Taiwan

In addition to placing high on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, TAIWANIA 2 ranks 10th on the Green500 list of the most efficient systems in the world. Both rankings are the best ever recorded in the history of Taiwan.

Powered by 2,016 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, TAIWANIA 2 can deliver 9 petaflops of computing power to support high performance computing and AI workloads at scale.

This extreme processing power means it can feed 1.76 million images into an AI model for deep learning training in the time it takes to snap your fingers. And it will lead to massive speedups for tasks such as pathogen identification and disease diagnosis, handling a week’s worth of computation in as little as five hours.

TAIWANIA 2 joins a lineup of record-breaking systems that use NVIDIA V100 GPU accelerators, including Summit, the world’s fastest supercomputer, based in the U.S.; Europe’s fastest supercomputer, Piz Daint; and Japan’s No. 1 system, ABCI.

“Taiwanese companies are now valuing up their products and services to secure the competitiveness in the global market and AI is the key driving force,” said Liang-Gee Chen, Minister of Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology. “The greatest ever TAIWANIA 2 AI system in Taiwan was built with the most advanced technology to make it a powerful tool for industry to innovate. We are now witnessing a new wave of revolution that adopts AI solutions to open up new business possibilities.”

TAIWANIA 2 is the result of an AI initiative launched last year by Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology, Asustek Computer, Quanta Computer and Taiwan Fixed Network and NVIDIA to boost Taiwan’s AI capabilities.

Industry Leaders Work Together

The supercomputer represents a 60x growth of Taiwan’s computing capability within three years, a huge leap forward compared to its predecessor, TAIWANIA 1.

The seven-month construction of the system was a massive, and massively complex, project. It was supervised by the National Center for High-Performance Computing and the National Applied Research Laboratories under the Ministry of Science and Technology, along with industry leaders Quanta Computer, Asustek Computer and Taiwan Fixed Network, which assisted with computing nodes and storage, cloud service system and information security, respectively.

“Quanta is pleased to contribute our technology and expertise for the best supercomputer that keeps the momentum of strengthening Taiwan’s AI going,” said Barry Lam, founder and chairman of Quanta Computer. “AI is now included in our business operations as well, and we, as a company, are looking forward to how we can benefit from these computing services.”

TAIWANIA 2’s powerful computing performance will be used initially to support government-led projects such as national territory modeling from the Ministry of the Interior, cultural heritage reconstruction from the Ministry of Culture, natural disaster prevention and control from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and precision medicine from the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

Adoption for various industrial applications such as healthcare, smart cities, smart manufacturing, fintech and more are planned for deployment later.

NVIDIA Powers HPC Now and Beyond

According to Gartner, enterprises in Asia are deploying AI faster than any other region in the world for services like chatbots, process optimization and fraud and transactional data analysis for the insurance, telecom and retailing industries. These computation-intensive tasks are all GPU accelerated.

To ensure every organization from every domain gets the essential computing capacity needed for their AI and HPC workloads, NVIDIA works with governmental authorities to build up dedicated environments as well as cloud service providers such as Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle to make GPU acceleration accessible and scalable.