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San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), which is part of the School of Computer, Information and Data Sciences at UC San Diego, received an Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide computing support to research groups that will use the NVIDIA DGX Cloud platform. The SDSC will focus on optimizing system configurations, monitoring performance, and determining the best ways to execute pilot projects on the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resources (NAIRR).
“Our work will focus on supporting dedicated systems for each research group with NAIRR pilot awards,” said Principal Investigator (PI) Mahidhar Tatineni, director of user services for SDSC high performance computing (HPC). “Unlike systems shared by many users, dedicated systems will allow researchers to have uninterrupted access to perform modeling that requires weeks or months. For example, some tools require special configurations that are not possible in a shared system environment, and NVIDIA DGX Cloud allows us to work with NAIRR Pilot researchers to create custom environments for their work.
Tatineni explained that once researchers create the right setup, they can benefit from the best of both worlds by using cloud servers and on-site physical servers in supercomputing centers to increase the potential for new scientific discoveries.
“In short, our EAGER project will provide guidelines, training, and tools to help NAIRR Pilot researchers use cloud platforms like NVIDIA DGX Cloud more effectively, making it easier to optimize their work and speeding up workflows. research,” Tatineni said.
NVIDIA DGX-Cloud is a fully managed, high-performance AI platform for generative AI development that gives developers access to NVIDIA’s latest accelerated computing architecture. The platform provides dedicated access to capabilities that support the AI lifecycle, from the creation and customization of cutting-edge base models to serverless inference.
“These attributes make the system ideal for NAIRR pilot projects that require large-scale AI resources for targeted research campaigns,” Tatineni said.
NVIDIA made a significant contribution DGX Cloud Resources to the NAIRR pilot program. The use of DGX Cloud is intended to enable proposals that can benefit from dedicated access to a 32-node cluster for sustained AI computing campaigns that are expected to take weeks or months to complete.
NAIRR connects America’s research and education communities to responsible and trusted AI, computing, data, software, training and education resources to advance research, discovery and innovation.
SDSC experts have been involved in NAIRR activities since the beginning. Michael Norman, former director of the SDSC and professor emeritus of astrophysics at UC San Diego, was one of 12 members of the NAIRR working group who, at the request of the Biden administration in 2021, worked to develop a model for a national approach to AI. In January 2023, the NAIRR working group submitted its final report/implementation planwhich guided the creation of the NAIRR pilot program.
The main contributions of the SDSC include:
- THE NAIRR Pilot Portal, developed by SDSC’s SGX3 Center of Excellence to Scientific gateways and led by Michael Zentner, former director of SDSC’s Sustainable Scientific Software Division;
- the computing resources of the Expanse supercomputer (CPU, GPU allocations) and the Voyager resource equipped with custom Habana processors for deep learning; And
- the National Research Platform (PNR), led by SDSC Director Frank Würthwein, offering a range of NAIRR educational resources.
The EAGER grant will be instrumental in enabling researchers to effectively use their NAIRR Pilot awards on the NVIDIA DGX Cloud Platform. The project is funded by the NSF (award no. 2438294).
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