The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) announced it has been awarded an Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award from the U.S. National Science Foundation to provide IT support to research groups who will use Nvidia’s DGX Cloud platform.
SDSC, part of the School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences at UC San Diego, says it will focus on optimization of system setups, performance monitoring, and determining the best ways to run National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot projects on the resources.
“Our work will focus on supporting dedicated systems for each research group with NAIRR Pilot awards,” said Principal Investigator Mahidhar Tatineni, who is user services director for SDSC’s HPC systems, according to a release from SDSC’s Kimberly Mann Bruch.
"Unlike systems that are shared by many users, the dedicated systems will allow for researchers to have uninterrupted access to perform modeling that requires weeks or months to complete. For example, some tools need special configurations that aren’t 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 said.
Nvidia’s DGX Cloud is a fully managed AI platform that features cloud-based AI supercomputing architecture and offers the hardware and software tools needed for building generative AI applications and training, inferencing, and deploying foundation models.
“These attributes make the system ideal for NAIRR Pilot projects that need large-scale AI resources for focused research campaigns,” Principal Investigator Tatineni said.
NVIDIA has contributed significant DGX cloud resources the NAIRR Pilot program, SDSC reports. Usage of DGX Cloud is aimed at enabling proposals that can benefit from dedicated access to a 32-node cluster for sustained AI computing campaigns that are anticipated to take weeks or months to complete.
NAIRR connects U.S. research and education communities to responsible and trustworthy AI resources, as well as computational, data, software, training and educational resources to advance research, discovery and innovation.
SDSC says its experts have been involved with NAIRR activities since its beginning. Former SDSC Director and UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Astrophysics Michael Norman was one of the 12 NAIRR Task Force members who, at the request of the Biden Administration in 2021, worked to develop a blueprint for a national approach to AI. In January 2023, the NAIRR Task Force submitted its final report/implementation plan, which guided the creation of the NAIRR Pilot program, the school reports.
The EAGER grant will be instrumental in enabling researchers to make effective use of their NAIRR Pilot awards on the NVIDIA DGX Cloud platform. The project is funded by the NSF (award no. 2438294).
