Neocortex and Bridges-2: A High Performance AI+HPC Ecosystem for Science, Discovery, and Societal Good

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming research through analysis of massive datasets and accelerating simulations by factors of up to a billion. Such acceleration eclipses the speedups that were made possible though improvements in CPU process and design and other kinds of algorithmic advances. It sets the stage for a new era of discovery in which previously intractable challenges will become surmountable, with applications in fields such as discovering the causes of cancer and rare diseases, developing effective, affordable drugs, improving food sustainability, developing detailed understanding of environmental factors to support protection of biodiversity, and developing alternative energy sources as a step toward reversing climate change. To succeed, the research community requires a high-performance computational ecosystem that seamlessly and efficiently brings together scalable AI, general-purpose computing, and large-scale data management. The authors, at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), launched a second-generation computational ecosystem to enable AI-enabled research, bringing together carefully designed systems and groundbreaking technologies to provide at no cost a uniquely capable platform to the research community. It consists of two major systems: Neocortex and Bridges-2. Neocortex embodies a revolutionary processor architecture to vastly shorten the time required for deep learning training, foster greater integration of artificial deep learning with scientific workflows, and accelerate graph analytics. Bridges-2 integrates additional scalable AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and high-performance parallel file systems for simulation, data pre- and post-processing, visualization, and Big Data as a Service. Neocortex and Bridges-2 are integrated to form a tightly coupled and highly flexible ecosystem for AI- and data-driven research.