Bridges-2 Supercomputing Platform Begins Operations at PSC

A $10-million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded a new major supercomputing platform at PSC. In partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), PSC has deployed Bridges-2, a system designed to provide researchers with massive computational capacity and the flexibility to adapt to the rapidly evolving field of data- and computation-intensive research. Bridges-2 is available at no cost for research and education and at cost-recovery rates for other purposes.

Bridges-2 will accelerate discovery to benefit science, society, and the nation. PSC has designed its unique architecture to catalyze breakthroughs in critically important areas such as understanding the brain, developing new materials for sustainable energy production and quantum computing, assembling genomes of crop species to improve agricultural efficiency, exploring the universe via multimessenger astrophysics and enabling technologies for smart cities.

The Bridges-2 system will begin operations in late 2020. You can find more information about Bridges-2 here.

Neocortex, a Groundbreaking AI Supercomputer, Begins Operations at PSC

Thanks to a $5-million NSF award, PSC has deployed a unique high performance artificial intelligence (AI) system. Neocortex introduces fundamentally new hardware to greatly accelerate AI research. PSC, a joint computational research center between Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, has built the new supercomputer in partnership with Cerebras Systems and HPE.

Neocortex goes beyond the technologies that have powered much of the advancement in AI since 2012. The system will do this by exploring a revolutionary combination of Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) processors, which are designed specifically to accelerate AI, and an extremely large-memory HPE Superdome Flex system for massive data handling capability. PSC plans for this balanced system to democratize access for researchers to game-changing compute power for training, the most time-consuming step of AI, to be much faster, even interactive.  Neocortex will begin operations in late 2020.

You can find more information about Neocortex here.