What are Intel® Gaudi® 1, Intel® Gaudi® 2 and HPUs?

Intel Gaudi 1 and Intel Gaudi 2 are the first- and second-generation AI hardware accelerators designed by Habana Labs and Intel. A single server contains 8 devices called Habana Processing Units (HPUs) with 96GB of memory each on Gaudi2 and 32GB on first-gen Gaudi. Check out here for more information about the underlying hardware architecture.

The Habana SDK is called SynapseAI and is common to both first-gen Gaudi and Gaudi2. As a consequence, 🤗 Optimum Habana is fully compatible with both generations of accelerators.

Execution modes

Two execution modes are supported on HPUs for PyTorch, which is the main deep learning framework the 🤗 Transformers and 🤗 Diffusers libraries rely on:

See here how to use these execution modes in Optimum for Intel Gaudi.

Distributed training

First-gen Gaudi and Gaudi2 are well-equipped for distributed training:

Inference

HPUs can also be used to perform inference:

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