Stony Brook Receives $13.77M NSF Grant to Deploy a National Supercomputer

Collaboration with the University at Buffalo will Democratize Access to Artificial Intelligence and Research Computing

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $13.77 million grant to Stony Brook University's Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS), in collaboration with the University at Buffalo. The award, "Sustainable Cyber-infrastructure for Expanding Participation," will deliver cutting-edge computing and data resources to power advanced research nationwide.

The funding will be used to procure and operate a high-performance, highly energy-efficient computer designed to handle the growing needs of artificial intelligence research and other scientific fields that require large amounts of memory and computing power. By making this resource widely available to researchers, students, and educators across the country, the project will expand access to advanced tools, support groundbreaking discoveries, and train the next generation of scientists.

The new system will utilize low-cost and low-energy AmpereOne® M Advanced Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) Machine processors that are designed to excel in artificial intelligence (AI) inference and imperfectly optimized workloads that presently characterize much of academic research computing. Multiple Qualcomm® Cloud AI inference accelerators will also increase energy efficiency, enabling the use of the largest AI models. The AmpereOne® M processors, in combination with the efficient generative AI inference performance and large memory capacity of the Qualcomm Cloud AI inference accelerators, will directly advance the mission of the NSF-led National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR).

This is the first deployment in academia of both of these technologies that have transformed computing in the commercial cloud. The new IACS-led supercomputer will efficiently execute diverse workloads in an energy- and cost-efficient manner, providing easily accessible, competitive and consistent performance without requiring sophisticated programming skills or knowledge of advanced hardware features.

"This project employs a comprehensive, multilayered strategy, with regional and national elements to ensure the widest possible benefits," said IACS director Robert J. Harrison. "The team will collaborate with multiple initiatives and projects, to reach a broad audience that spans all experience levels from high school students beginning to explore science and technology to faculty members advancing innovation through scholarship and teaching."

"The University at Buffalo is excited to partner with Stony Brook on this new project that will advance research, innovation and education by expanding the nation's cyber-infrastructure to scientific disciplines that were not high performance computing-heavy prior to the AI boom, as well as expanding to non-R1 universities, which also didn't have much of high-performance computing usage in the past," said co-principal investigator Nikolay Simakov, a computational scientist at the University at Buffalo Center for Computational Research.

Nationally and regionally, this funding will support a variety of projects, with an emphasis on fields of research that are not targeted by other national resources (e.g., life sciences and computational linguistics). In particular, the AmpereOne® M system will excel on high-throughput workloads common to genomics and bioinformatics research, AI/ML inference, and statistical analysis, among others. To help domain scientists achieve excellent performance on the system, software applications in these and related fields will be optimized for Ampere hardware and made readily available. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and that this initiative has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader-impacts review criteria.