Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have leveraged AI to enhance their capabilities with a newly established off-campus supercomputer named Betty.
The primary AI system was supplied by NVIDIA and constructed according to their reference specifications for a SuperPOD. A dedicated NDR400 InfiniBand fabric allows for the scaling of a single experiment across the entire SuperPOD. The setup consists of 31 eight-way GPU nodes.
Betty was created to manage AI applications that can analyse large datasets and generate progressively refined outcomes, adapting over time to fulfil specific directives from the researchers.
“The needs for modern AI research have grown to a scale…where it is no longer feasible to be maintained by any one school,” Penn Advanced Research Computing Centre’s (PARCC) associate director of AI and technology, Kenneth Chaney, told The Daily Pennsylvanian.
Betty showcases a transition to collective high-performance computing at Penn. Rather than each lab keeping its servers, which Marylyn Ritchie, the vice dean of artificial intelligence and computing at the Perelman School of Medicine, referred to as expensive and unfeasible, researchers now have the option to utilise a centralised resource via PARCC.
“In the future, we will be leveraging AI in all areas of research. While GPU computing may only be needed in some fields today, I think we will see it adopted in many/most fields in the future,” Ritchie wrote in a statement to The DP.
Ritchie pointed out that Betty requires specialised energy and cooling systems, which would be challenging to provide on campus. Meanwhile, Chaney mentioned that the current version demands one megawatt of power, which he described as impossible to scale in urban Philadelphia.
Ritchie emphasised that Betty and all future PARCC computers will be fully accessible, regardless of whether the system is located off-campus.
The supercomputer was named after Frances Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Snyder Holberton, a trailblazer for women in the field of computing and one of the first six programmers of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer created at Penn in the 1940s. This name acknowledges the university’s contribution to the advancement of computing innovation.
The post UPenn Launches Off-Campus Supercomputer ‘Betty’ Supported by NVIDIA AI System appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
