Two years after the Israel Innovation Authority began its national AI program, it is now nearing the purchase of 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 budget of the Innovation Authority administration and a further NIS 150 million in financing for the tech giant that wins the tender.
A supercomputer is actually a large structure of standard computer servers that are connected to each other by communication cables and operate together. The aim is to perform large computing operations that ordinary computers are not capable of, like simulating activity of molecules during drug development. Recently, supercomputers have also been used for AI applications and are used to train language models for companies or to run them.
Training of language models actually allows any organization to implement capabilities from the chat engine worlds of ChatGPT or Cloud. In this way a tech company can build, for example, a customer service engine adapted 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 for domestic needs. Designed for use by tech companies and Israeli 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 by the tech industry and academia.
The national plan
The main reason for the delay in building the supercomputer is that it was initially under the responsibility of the Ministry of Defense Directorate for Research and Development (DDR&D) (MAFAT), which was not quick to get the project underway, and when the war broke out, the matter dropped in its order of priorities. The Innovation Authority, which coordinates the national AI program, rescued the supercomputer project from the Ministry of Defense.
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 a regulatory policy and finance national projects in the field. The strategic plan, which was submitted in 2020, has been allocated a NIS 1 billion budget spread over two phases between 2022 and 2027. Areas of activity in the plan include support for the development of language models in Hebrew and Arabic, development of medical databases, developing a supercomputer, setting up an independent AI research institute, and computing for government ministries.
Besides a supercomputer for training language models, the program operates two more laboratories in the field of supercomputing. One is a laboratory for chip companies interested in performing tests in a supercomputer environment in collaboration with Israeli chip company NextSilicon, and the other is a scientific computing service designed for running mathematical models that require core processors (CPU), rather than graphics processors. This service will be operated remotely from a European server through a connection to the EU's supercomputer project, and will be hosted in a country friendly to Israel - most likely Germany.
The AI National Directorate at the Israel Innovation Authority is currently being challenged by the Prime Minister's Office and Ministry of Finance, which want to set up a national directorate within the Prime Minister's Office. The plan would see budget management taken away from the Innovation Authority and inter-ministerial forum.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on November 11, 2024.
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