NERSC AI

AI is transforming science across all kinds of domains and application areas within the DOE science portfolio. The computational needs of scientists developing AI applications are also growing. NERSC supports this evolving workload through

• Deployment of advanced hardware and software systems for AI
• Applications of AI for science through deep engagements with domain scientists
• Empowerment of the scientific community and workforce development through outreach events

NERSC has driven the emergence of modern AI and deep learning for science in recent years. Some highlights include:

• Built the first deep learning application to run on over 10k nodes with scientific tasks across climate and LHC physics (presented at SC17). This was followed by the NERSC-led first exascale deep learning application that won the 2018 Gordon Bell Prize.
• Deploying Perlmutter. In 2021, NVIDIA described this as the worlds fastest AI supercomputer at the time. This was quickly made available for Open Science. Early applications included the first deep learning model to achieve the skill of numerical weather prediction  and novel particle physics publications
• Several first-of-a-kind deep learning applications were led by NERSC. Including the first generative deep learning for science (CosmoGAN and CaloGAN) in 2017, and the first self-supervised deep learning (for cosmology applications in 2020 and 2021). Further recent application publications with deep NERSC involvement are listed below.  
• Running tutorials and schools to empower the community. For example the deep learning at scale tutorial at the SC conference has been led by NERSC since 2018 (SC24 material available here). Overall NERSC tutorials and schools have had 1000s of total participants, bringing AI expertise to the wider science and HPC world. 

The NERSC AI ecosystem

NERSC provides powerful computing systems for science, including our current flagship Perlmutter supercomputer, which is well designed for AI with over 7,000 NVIDIA A100 GPUs.

NERSC also provides a rich software ecosystem for AI, including prebuilt software environments, containers, and fully-customizable user environments.

Other relevant offerings for AI users include a JupyterHub service, the Spin platform for user-defined services, and the Superfacility API for interacting with NERSC systems in integrated and automated ways.

Related activities