The Car is the Computer: Nissan draws upon Silicon Valley

Nissan Advanced Technical Center – Silicon Valley (NATC-SV) is Nissan's Center of Excellence for Artificial Intelligence and Next-generation Mobility solutions in Silicon Valley. It is where our researchers and scientists focus on Materials Science (for superior battery technology), Robotics Science (for Autonomous Drive), Mathematical Sciences (for AI/Machine Learning, Large Language Models - LLM, Large Multimodal Models – LMM and new AI solutions), Computer Science & Engineering (for custom silicon solutions for the growing demands for computational power in the vehicle), and Data and Social Sciences (for safety and quality of the driving experience and, in the case of electric cars, advances in infrastructure). All the effort is aimed at improving mobility today and inventing real solutions for tomorrow. Creating our Center in Silicon Valley was no accident. Being in Silicon Valley means we can draw from, collaborate on, and contribute to innovations happening here in the heart of San Francisco Bay Area. We benefit from the proximity to world renowned universities. Stanford University is just around the corner and UC Berkeley is a mere hop to the other side of the bay. We get access to professors, researchers, scientists, and engineers creating technologies that drive our world (and cars too). As we embarked on architecting and developing our next generation of autonomous driving solutions, we cast a net looking for ways to do something big and not just an incremental step in compute capabilities. We approach automotive software and custom silicon development as a co-design project.

If you live in Silicon Valley, you might have seen some of our modified cars for Autonomous Drive (AD) Level 4 traveling along our streets, roads, freeways and highways. These cars are becoming "supercomputers on wheels" and forcing a review of Electrical & Electronics (EE) Architecture in the car. The concept of Software-Defined Vehicles (SDV's) was advanced to meet this new context. SDV clearly defines software and hardware domains, and provides efficiency in construction, which implies lower costs. Efficiency is also extended to maintenance of the vehicle by adding over the air (OTA) capabilities to update car features. On the hardware level, the OTA update of all the car features is enabled by a centralized computing architecture in the car. This centralized computing architecture oversees everything happening in the car. Myriad sensor data is collected in the car zones, aggregated and sent to the central computer using high-speed low latency in-car network. Those sensor data are then processed and decisions come back to the many actuators in the zones using the same high-speed network. This high-speed network is thus an advance that minimize the wiring in the car, lowering costs and weight. All this also brings new concerns of isolation, security and safety of data and people in SDV's that are at the cutting edge of research and technology development.

Similar to late Google VP and Fellow Luiz Andre Barroso's "The Datacenter is the computer", which instigated the view that the datacenter is to be thought as a massive computer instead of a collection of individual servers, we, at Nissan, instigate the thought that "The Car is the computer". And with an even more spectacular effect since SDVs materialize the convergence of 3 industries: (1) robotics industry (the autonomous driving car is a robot on 4 wheels), (2) AI industry (the car will see the world, understand the world, and take decisions faster and better than any human driver), and (3) High-Performance computing industry (both computer and network industry together).

Pace picked up. It turns out that Ampere does not just have technology. They have friends too. ASRock Rack US in Fremont 17 minutes away custom built our first Ampere server with FPGAs & NVIDIA GPUs. It was a 4U server, large enough to become our workhorse in development, with easy access for maintenance and addition of all the PCIe accelerator cards. We jokingly named this first server "Tiny" who makes a cameo appearance in figure 6.

To enable faster delivery of better software and algorithms, we thought it important to equip our autonomous driving developers with AI developer desktops using the same 128 core Ampere processors we're designing into our R&D vehicles. So we commissioned System76 in Denver Colorado 2 hours 25 minutes away by plane. While not physically just down the street, the Denver "Silicon Mountain" hotspot of innovation is very much the kindred spirit of Silicon Valley. System76 are brilliant engineers and meticulous craftsman, so Nissan having System76 design, manufacture and support our AI developer desktops just a short flight and 1 time zone away has been immensely helpful for us. Ampere visited their factory to inspected Nissan's "Thelio Astra" AI developer desktops during product development and gave us wonderful feedback.