CREDIT: AWS
TECH & AI
AWS has activated Project Rainier, an AI compute cluster featuring nearly 500,000 Trainium2 chips spread across data centres in the United States and completed less than 12 months after AWS first announced the project at its re: Invent conference in December 2024. Anthropic, the AI safety and research company, is using Project Rainier to train and deploy Claude, its foundation model. AWS expects Anthropic to scale to more than one million Trainium2 chips by the end of 2025 for workloads that include both training and inference operations.
The project represents a 70 % increase in AWS’ s AI computing infrastructure compared to previous deployments. Project Rainier provides Anthropic with more than five times the compute power the company used to train earlier versions of its models.
AWS Trainium2 delivers custom silicon for model training The Trainium2 chip was designed by Annapurna Labs, AWS’ s custom silicon division, for training foundation models and large language models. A single Trainium2 chip can complete trillions of calculations per second. The EC2 Trn2 instances feature 16 Trainium2 chips and deliver 20.8 peak petaflops of compute performance. AWS claims the instances offer 30 to 40 % better price performance than current GPU-based EC2 instances.
The architecture uses Trn2 UltraServers, which combine four physical servers into one unit. Each UltraServer contains 64 Trainium2 chips interconnected through NeuronLink, a high-speed connection
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