The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has received an Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award from the U.S. National Science Foundation. This grant will allow SDSC to provide IT support to research teams using Nvidia’s DGX Cloud platform.
As part of the School of Computing, Information, and Data Sciences at UC San Diego, SDSC will focus on optimizing system configurations, monitoring performance, and finding the best ways to run National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot projects on the platform.
The team, led by Principal Investigator Mahidhar Tatineni, will support dedicated systems for each research group working with NAIRR Pilot awards. Unlike shared systems, these dedicated setups will give researchers uninterrupted access to perform long-term modeling that may take weeks or months. Some research tools require special configurations that shared systems cannot accommodate, and Nvidia’s DGX Cloud allows SDSC to work with NAIRR Pilot researchers to create custom environments tailored to their needs.
Nvidia’s DGX Cloud is a fully managed AI platform with a cloud-based supercomputing architecture. It provides the hardware and software necessary to build generative AI applications and support tasks like training, inferencing, and deploying foundation models. This makes it an ideal solution for NAIRR Pilot projects that require large-scale AI resources for extensive research.
Nvidia has contributed significant DGX Cloud resources to the NAIRR Pilot program. The system allows researchers to access a 32-node cluster, providing the dedicated AI computing power needed for long-term campaigns, some of which may take weeks or even months to complete.
NAIRR connects U.S. research and education communities to reliable AI resources, including computing power, data, software, training, and educational tools, to foster research and innovation.
SDSC has been involved with NAIRR from the start. Michael Norman, former SDSC Director and UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Astrophysics, was one of the 12 members of the NAIRR Task Force. This group, formed at the request of the Biden Administration in 2021, developed a national strategy for AI. The Task Force’s final report, submitted in January 2023, helped shape the NAIRR Pilot program.
