Grace Blackwell Desktop Supercomputer: First Impressions
4 days ago
- #Supercomputer
- #AI
- #Data Science
- NVIDIA announced the DGX Spark, a desktop-sized AI supercomputer aimed at developers and data scientists.
- The DGX Spark features the GB10 chip, combining a Grace ARM CPU and Blackwell GPU, delivering 1 petaflop of AI compute.
- Comes with 128 GB memory, 4 TB local storage, and Ubuntu Linux 24.04.
- Useful for computationally demanding tasks like model training and evaluation.
- Available under different brands like Dell, Lenovo, and Asus; the author chose Dell Pro Max with GB10.
- Setup can be done via a graphical wizard or headless via Wi-Fi hotspot and browser.
- Supports both plain SSH and NVIDIA Sync for remote access.
- Runs GNOME desktop on X.org, with a retro UNIX workstation aesthetic.
- Includes NVIDIA DGX Dashboard (port 11000) and JupyterLab (port 11002) for data science workflows.
- Works flawlessly in headless mode with SSH tunnels for remote access.
- Performance test showed significant speed improvement over a laptop for data science tasks.
- Grace Blackwell platform offers local supercomputer speeds, reminiscent of classic UNIX workstations.