The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center announced a $4.9 million award from the National Science Foundation to upgrade its flagship supercomputer.
The supercomputer, Bridges-2, was first installed at the PSC in 2021 backed by a $10 million award from the NSF. At the time, then director Shawn Brown told the Business Times that a priority was to "support rapidly evolving research which is data centric, such as the AI and data analytics communities."
In the time since then, AI has quickly moved beyond being a research field. In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, which is credited by many for bringing AI technology into the mainstream. Alongside that, the sector saw significant levels of investment, something that the Pittsburgh region has benefitted from.
While those working with Bridges-2 were obviously aware of the technology, they've also been effected by this boom. On the hardware side, the $4.9 million will pay for ten computing nodes, powered largely in part by top-of-the-line Nvidia H100 graphics processing units. The boom has increased demand for Nvidia's units, which has driven its prices up, leading to it becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world. Alongside that financial growth, the company has made hardware advancements, which led to the release of the H100 unit last year.
"Augmenting [the system] with H100-based GPU nodes will significantly improve the performance of our community's [machine learning] and [high performance computing] workloads," Bridges-2 principal investigator Sergiu Sanielevici said in a prepared statement.
On the computation side, the Center is hoping the new GPU nodes will enable breakthrough research in "safe and trustworthy AI," something that a release from the center calls "currently out of reach." Other goals include image and speech classification, environmental research and molecular discovery.
Bridges-2 is also utilized as part of a National AI Research Resource pilot program, which is backed by the Federal government as part of a Biden administration effort to ensure the "safe, secure and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence." This pilot program will take advantage of the advancements.
