Universities Invest in High Performance Computing to Support AI Education

The Faculty of Engineering went reside with the HPC system in April, piloting it in two undergraduate programs led by Ghassan AlRegib, a professor within the College of Electrical and Laptop Engineering: a machine studying (ML) class and a Foundations of AI class open to all second-year college students. In that class, one project is to construct an AI software that may inform customers their location on campus from {a photograph} of their environment, Bloch says.

“The aim with that class is to make AI accessible — and to some extent, comprehensible — to college students who would not have a specialised laptop science background,” he says.

This college yr, about 10 programs will make use of the AI Makerspace, together with Faculty of Computing lessons. The college can also be encouraging school in Georgia Tech’s different faculties to benefit from the supercomputer.

Beforehand, school in about 60 programs universitywide have supplied college students entry to an current on-campus HPC system. Nevertheless, utilizing the AI supercomputer requires extra technical experience, says Eric Coulter, analysis computing facilitation lead with Georgia Tech’s Partnership of Advanced Computing Environment (PACE), which manages the AI Makerspace and offers HPC technical assist.

To simplify use, the Faculty of Engineering is growing interfaces and software program packages, together with some automation instruments, to make it extra user-friendly, Bloch says. “We wish to decrease the bar of entry by making it simpler to deploy assets.”

Safety is baked into the system. PACE makes use of entry management insurance policies and the college’s centralized authentication system to make sure that solely approved customers log in to the supercomputer, Coulter says. PACE additionally makes use of a number of dashboards to observe logs, node efficiency and community load and troubleshoots issues once they come up.

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The college will ramp up utilization of the AI Makerspace over time.

Sooner or later, college seniors will be capable of use the HPC system for his or her capstone tasks, whereas college students within the college’s CREATE-X entrepreneur program will likely be allowed to make use of it for early stage prototyping, Bloch says.

“We be taught a couple of issues each time we ask college students to make use of it, be it from the technical aspect or the academic aspect. We wish to current tasks to college students in a means that’s doable and never daunting,” he says.

UAlbany’s AI Plus Initiative Brings Machine Studying to Academia

Two years in the past, the University at Albany launched its AI Plus initiative, a campuswide effort to combine AI training all through its educational and analysis packages. And now, the college has new HPC techniques to energy analysis and college students’ research utilizing AI.

First, in August 2023, NVIDIA partnered with the college and made its DGX Cloud AI supercomputing service obtainable to the campus neighborhood. This September, the college launched an on-premises, NVIDIA-powered AI supercomputer that gives the newest state-of-the-art expertise to researchers and college who incorporate AI into their curriculum.

“We’re planning for analysis and educational coursework — massive jobs and small jobs,” says UAlbany CIO Brian Heaton. “Whether or not school is skilled with AI or they’re simply introducing it into their curriculum, we’re making the precise techniques obtainable and offering the correct of assist to assist them navigate these techniques.”