The Georgia Advanced Computing Resource Center, part of the University of Georgia’s Enterprise Information Technology Services, invests in innovative, high-demand equipment for high-performance computing clusters.
The university’s $2.4 million investment will support the research computing needs of faculty across a range of disciplines, including artificial intelligence, data science and bioinformatics, and is expected to be available for use beginning in the fall 2024 semester.
“This investment will enable UGA researchers to more quickly experiment with AI approaches, test new ideas, and improve AI models more quickly,” said Guy Cormier, director of research computing at EITS. “Overall, the impact of these resources on UGA’s AI research will be overwhelmingly positive, accelerating the pace of discovery, enabling researchers to tackle more ambitious problems, and fostering collaborative projects across multiple disciplines.”
The EITS team will install 26 new Graphics Processing Unit compute nodes on the Sapelo2 cluster, a high-performance computing cluster that powers many of the advanced computer operations on campus. Three additional compute nodes with large RAM memory will also be installed to accommodate specific workloads. GPU compute nodes are highly specialized processors that excel at specific mathematical operations. Originally developed for gaming and video rendering applications, GPUs have seen orders of magnitude increase in processing times, making them the processors of choice for AI-related applications.
“I would like to thank EITS Vice Chancellor Tim Chester and Provost S. Jack Hu for providing the necessary funding to acquire this important new computing resource for UGA’s research community,” said Alan Dorsey, EITS vice CIO for research and UGA physics professor.
