Commenting on the largest donation made by his company to Israel, which amounted to $15 million, Gideon Rosenberg, director of the American chip manufacturer Nvidia, said: “We are proud to see this broad support from the Nvidia families in Israel and around the world, and we are grateful for their prayers and hope for the return of our colleague.” Avinatan Or and other hostages from Hamas families.
But who is the engineer Avinatan Or, who works at Nvidia in Israel, whom Rosenberg mentioned in his comment?
In the grip of resistance
The name Avinatan Or (30 years old) appeared for the first time in a video circulated on social media showing the moment he and his girlfriend, Noa Argamani, were captured by individuals from Gaza who entered the cover area after the launch of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood at the hands of the Islamic Resistance Movement “Hamas” on October 7. the past.
The video clip appeared on Telegram of the moment his girlfriend, Noa Argamani, was taken away on a bicycle after being captured with her boyfriend, Or. Or is an engineer who lives in Tel Aviv, where he and Argamani were planning to move in together.
According to his profile on LinkedIn, Orr works as a “design for test” engineer, or as it is known for short, “DFT”, which is an important field in electronic chip manufacturing that is concerned with designing the structure of integrated circuits, or what is known as “IC”, to make them Testable, this process facilitates the development of manufacturing tests and their application to designed devices.
The purpose of manufacturing tests is to verify that the product hardware does not contain manufacturing defects that could adversely affect the correct performance of the product.
Orr has been working for the American company in its branch in Israel since April 2022, and is a graduate of Ben Gurion University.
“NVIDIA”… American in origin, Israeli in love
The American graphics board design and chip manufacturing company NVIDIA is considered one of the largest companies supporting Israel and the Israeli economy, as the research and development activities it is currently carrying out in Israel are the company’s largest outside the United States, according to a report by the Australian Jewish News website.
Nvidia, which has a market value of $571 billion on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, replaced its competitor Intel, which has a market value of $196 billion, as the largest American chip maker and the second largest company in the world after Taiwan’s TSMC.
Nvidia’s growing operations are expanding in Israel, where it employs about 2,800 workers in seven research and development centers located in the Yokneam settlement, the Mellanox headquarters, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Raanana, and Beersheba in the south.
In 2020, the American company acquired the Israeli company Melanox – a local company specializing in developing and producing components designed to accelerate data transfer between servers and data storage systems for cloud computing and data centers – for $7 billion, and it was considered the largest investment in an Israeli company.
In 2021, NVIDIA established an additional center in Israel to develop CPUs for a range of technology applications, including artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles and robotics.
The new CPU group will join a variety of teams currently active in Israel, working on high-speed networking technologies, high-performance computing technologies, data processing unit development, artificial intelligence research, and other activities.
Nvidia has also been working with the Israeli company Excelro since its founding in 2014 until its recent acquisition, providing its block storage software for the company’s core networks.
The American company – which was founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malakowski, and Curtis Brehm as a company specializing in manufacturing graphics chips – has many other investments in Israel, including startups Fortelex, Fast Data, and Wika IO, according to the Finder Startup website.
“Israel 1AI” project
Nvidia, where Orr works, recently announced the completion of the first phase of its “Israel-1 AI” supercomputer and making it available for use by the company’s research and development teams and “selected partners.” The supercomputer is located in the Israel data center. A subsidiary of NVIDIA, according to a report by the Data Center Dynamics website.
The supercomputer provides 8 exaflops (flops) of the highest performance for artificial intelligence, and 130 petaflops of high-performance computing.
The system – once complete – contains 256 systems smaller than Nvidia HGX H100 processors, combining 2,048 graphics processing units, with more than 34 million CUDA cores (short for Compute Unified Computer). Device Architecture, an architecture for parallel computing developed by Nvidia, one million 4th generation Tensor Cores, 2,560 DPU BlueField-3, and 80 Spectrum-4 switches. .
Gilad Shiner, senior vice president at NVIDIA, said: NVIDIA has worked with 800 startup companies in Israel and tens of thousands of software engineers.
The company completed the first phase of this project last November, two months earlier than expected, providing half the computing power of the entire system (four exaflops for artificial intelligence and 65 petaflops for standard HPC).
“Israel is home to world-leading AI researchers and developers who are creating applications for the next wave of AI,” said NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang.
With the NVIDIA supercomputer, a wide range of companies in Israel will create artificial intelligence that can transform the productivity and business models of organizations around the world.
It is planned that the company will complete the second phase of the supercomputer in the first half of 2024 unless the war currently taking place in Gaza affects this plan. It is not known once the second phase is completed whether Orr will then be with his fellow engineers at NVIDIA or will he still be a prisoner in prison. Gaza, or will he never witness this moment in his life?