In May 2022, the ALCF AI Testbed was officially rolled out to the research community as the facility began accepting proposals for computing time on its Cerebras CS-2 and SambaNova DataScale systems.

A growing collection of some of the world’s most advanced AI accelerators available for science, the ALCF AI Testbed also includes Graphcore, Groq, and Habana AI systems that will be made available to researchers in the near future.

The ALCF assembled and launched the AI Testbed to enable researchers to explore next-generation machine learning applications and workloads to advance the use of AI for science. The testbed platforms complement the ALCF’s current and next-generation supercomputers to provide a state-of-the-art computing environment that supports pioneering research at the intersection of AI, big data, and HPC. Looking to the future, the ALCF is also using the testbed to determine how AI accelerators could be coupled with supercomputers to build and design next-generation computing facilities that meet the evolving needs of the research community.

Offering architectural features designed specifically for AI and data-centric workloads, the AI Testbed systems are uniquely well-suited to handle the growing amount of scientific data produced by supercomputers, light sources, telescopes, particle accelerators, and other experimental tools and facilities. The state-of-the-art accelerators are allowing researchers to explore novel workflows that combine AI methods with simulation and experimental science to accelerate the pace of discovery. Moreover, the testbed stands to significantly broaden data analysis and processing capabilities in the project workflows deployed at the ALCF beyond those supported by traditional CPU- and GPU-based machines.

To introduce researchers to using the AI accelerators for science, the ALCF hosted hands-on workshops for both the Cerebras and SambaNova systems. The two-day events covered system hardware, software, application porting, and best practices.

Researchers have already had some early successes in using the AI accelerators for various data-centric studies. The following summaries provide a glimpse of some of the science carried out on AI Testbed systems thus far.

Drug Discovery

A team of researchers leveraged the ALCF’s Groq system to accelerate the process of searching through a vast number of small molecules to find promising antiviral drugs to fight COVID-19. With billions upon billions of potential drug candidates to sort through, the scientists needed a way to dramatically speed up their search. In tests on a large dataset of molecules, the team found they could achieve 20 million predictions, or inferences, a second, vastly reducing the time needed for each search from days to minutes. The most promising candidates were sent to a laboratory for further testing on human cells.

Edge Computing

To keep pace with the growing amount of data produced at DOE light source facilities, researchers are looking to machine learning methods to help with tasks such as data reduction and providing insights to steer future experiments. Using the ALCF’s Cerebras and SambaNova systems, researchers demonstrated how specialized AI systems can be used to quickly train machine learning models through a geographically distributed workflow. To obtain actionable information in real-time, the team trained the models on the remote AI system and then deployed them on edge computing devices near the experimental data source.

Fusion Energy

As part of an effort to improve predictive capabilities for fusion energy research, researchers turned to the ALCF’s Groq system to accelerate the performance of deep learning models used to investigate fusion control in real time. The Groq system’s architecture ensured fixed, predictable compute times for a key phase of deep learning (inference) that would vary in duration if carried out on CPU- and GPU-driven machines. Ultimately, the researchers aim to develop a workflow that leverages AI and exascale computing power for training and inference tasks that will advance fusion energy research.

Neutrino Physics

To improve the neutrino signal efficiency, scientists use image segmentation to tag each input pixel as one of three classes: cosmic-induced, neutrino-induced, or background noise. Deep learning has been a useful tool for accelerating this classic image segmentation task, but it has been limited by the image size that available GPU-based platforms can efficiently train on. Leveraging the ALCF’s SambaNova system, researchers were able to improve this method to establish a new state-of-the art accuracy level of 90.23% using images at their original resolution without the need to downsample. Their work demonstrates capabilities that can be used to advance model quality for a variety of important and challenging image processing problems.