Category I: Bridging the Gap Between AI/ML Computing Demands and Today's Capabilities

Advances in computing hardware and in artificial intelligence (AI) research have led to AI-focused systems that have transformed the landscape of computational research and of society itself. Much of today's AI research relies on access to large volumes of data and advanced computational power, which are often unavailable to researchers not located at well-resourced technology companies and universities.

This divide limits the ability of researchers to leverage AI to tackle the big challenges in our society. It further constrains the diversity of researchers and the breadth of ideas incorporated into AI innovations, thereby contributing to embedded biases and other systemic inequalities found in AI systems today. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will deploy and operate DeltaAI, an advanced computing and data resource that will be a companion system to NCSA’s Delta system.

In doing so, DeltaAI will greatly expand the AI-focused computing capacity available within the NSF-funded advanced computing ecosystem. The DeltaAI system builds upon the efforts and successes of NCSA’s Delta system in a way that is seamless and leverages the existing NSF investment in that infrastructure. This approach is achieved by deploying DeltaAI using similar system and storage hardware, and the same high-speed interconnect.

A vast array of next-generation graphics processors (GPUs) delivers a technological leap in AI computing capability that will make DeltaAI the keystone in the NSF AI computing portfolio for years to come. Advanced and modern web-based interfaces will make the resource more usable by the growing community of research domains employing AI methods in their research, and significant computing capacity will make more resources available to a more diverse group of researchers.

The DeltaAI system features a large and uniform pool of compute nodes that will enable advanced AI-based research, from single-node tasks to massively parallel AI codes. The system’s use of larger memory configuration GPUs will make new types of AI codes feasible that could not previously be undertaken. Taking advantage of next-generation NVIDIA graphics processors, DeltaAI builds on Delta by expanding what is already the most performant GPU computing resource in the National Science Foundation portfolio.

The compute elements of DeltaAI will provide more than 300 next-generation NVIDIA graphics processors delivering over 600 petaflops of half-precision floating point computing, distributed across an advanced network interconnect for application communications and access to an innovative, flash-based storage subsystem. Expanding the capacity and performance of the Delta storage subsystem, the DeltaAI storage environment will further transform large scale data-enabled and AI-based research workloads.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.