For years now, Tesla has been teasing the development of a new in-house supercomputer optimized for neural net video training.<\/p>\n
Tesla is handling an insane amount of video data from its fleet of over 1 million vehicles. It uses this video data to train its neural nets.<\/p>\n
The automaker found itself unsatisfied with current hardware options to train its computer vision neural nets and believed it could do better internally.<\/p>\n
Over the last two years, CEO Elon Musk has been teasing the development of Tesla\u2019s own supercomputer called \u201cDojo.\u201d Last year, he even teased that\u00a0Tesla\u2019s Dojo would have a capacity of over an\u00a0exaflop<\/a>, which\u00a0is one quintillion (1018<\/sup>) floating-point operations per second, or 1,000 petaFLOPS.<\/p>\n It could potentially make Dojo the new most powerful supercomputer in the world. At Tesla\u2019s AI Day<\/a> in August, Tesla unveiled Dojo<\/a>. <\/p>\n The automaker already has its Dojo chip and tile, but it is still working on building its full rack to create the supercomputer.<\/p>\n Now Tesla has released a whitepaper on its Dojo technology. <\/p>\n In the abstract, the automaker is describing a new standard to work with its computing platform:<\/p>\n \u201cThis standard specifies Tesla arithmetic formats and methods for the new 8-bit and 16-bit binary floating-point arithmetic in computer programming environments for deep learning neural network training. This standard also specifies exception conditions and the status flags thereof. An implementation of a floating-point system conforming to this standard may be realized entirely in software, entirely in hardware, or in any combination of software and hardware.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Here\u2019s the full whitepaper:<\/p>\n I\u2019m not going to lie, a lot of that stuff is going way over my head, and it\u2019s certainly more digestible for people familiar with programming for deep learning.<\/p>\n But it sounds like Tesla designed a new format called CFloat8 optimized to work on its Dojo Supercomputer platform.<\/p>\n It looks like the company hopes that other people would use the standard. However, it doesn\u2019t sound like Dojo is going to be available to people outside of Tesla for a little while.<\/p>\n During the company\u2019s earnings call last week, Tesla said that Dojo\u2019s capacity is currently fully utilized internally.<\/p>\n\n
Electrek\u2019s Take<\/h2>\n
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