OAC Core: AIMCI: AI-Guided Resource Management for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure

Advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) is undergoing disruptive changes in system architectures and application workloads. The landscape of cyberinfrastructure workloads is rapidly expanding beyond traditional computational simulations to include a hybrid mix of applications. CI facilities now host diverse high-performance systems with heterogeneous configurations, leading to a complex mix of computing, memory, and storage components.

Existing CI management methods, which are heavily heuristic or manual-based, struggle with these evolving challenges. This project addresses the complex challenges of CI resource management by integrating artificial intelligence (AI) technologies with human expertise. UIC is a federally designated Minority-Serving Institution (MSI).

An integrated education plan can strengthen diversity-focused programs at UIC, thus promoting greater diversity and inclusion within the scientific community.

The project transitions from managing isolated single clusters to coordinating facility-wide management, orchestrating the entire facility as a unified pool of diverse resources for a broad spectrum of applications with various resource requirements. Specifically, it aims to design and evaluate an AI-guided framework named AIMCI (Artificial Intelligence for Managing Cyberinfrastructure).

Key research thrusts are: (1) developing new AI models for predictive analysis of resource usage patterns and user behavior, (2) applying reinforcement learning methods to optimize resource management in a complex and dynamic computing environment, and (3) building a discrete event-driven simulator for exploratory simulation of CI resource management with human-in-the-loop interaction.

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.