Delivering Scalable Deep Learning to Research with Bridges-AI

Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly deep learning, is enabling tremendous advances and is itself of great research interest. To address these research requirements, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) expanded its Bridges supercomputer with Bridges-AI, providing the world’s most powerful AI servers to the U.S. national research community and their international collaborators. We describe the motivation and architecture of Bridges-AI and its integration with Bridges, which adds to Bridges’ capabilities for scalable, converged high-performance computing (HPC), AI, and Big Data. We then describe the software environment of Bridges-AI, particularly the introduction of containers for deep learning frameworks, machine learning, and graph analytics, and PSC’s approach to container deployment. We close with a discussion of the range of research challenges that Bridges-AI is enabling breakthroughs, highlighting development of AI-driven methods to identify immune responses with automated tumor detection in breast cancer.