The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center earned an NSF award to enhance its AI research capacity

A $4.9 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will fund an upgrade to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s flagship Bridges-2 supercomputer. The grant allows the center to add late-model powerful NVIDIA H100 graphics processing units (GPUs) to the system, further enhancing its ability to support research in and requiring AI, particularly in the context of massive data and high-performance computing.

“Bridges-2 is very popular with the scientific community,” said PSC Director Barr von Oehsen. “This expansion improves this already positive experience by offering more options for AI workloads. We can’t wait to see the science impact these new servers will enable.”

NSF initially awarded $10 million to PSC to build Bridges-2, which began production operations in 2021. In addition to massive Big Data and “traditional” high-performance computing problems, the system was designed to supercharge development and application of AI methods like machine learning to a range of scientific challenges of unprecedented scope and complexity.

The quantitative jump in performance afforded by the new GPU nodes will enable scientific breakthroughs in fields such as safe and trustworthy AI, image and speech classification, biomedical discovery and health care research, molecular and materials discovery and environmental and sustainability research.

The enhanced capacity and capability of the Bridges-2 GPU and data storage resources will also benefit the NSF effort to pilot the implementation of the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) program. Both Bridges-2 and PSC’s advanced AI supercomputer, Neocortex, are already resources in that program. Along with enhanced performance, the new nodes will introduce innovative training and outreach capabilities and initiatives to the AI and high-performance computing community and the NAIRR Pilot Project, in partnership with NVIDIA and HPE.