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To advance knowledge by enabling unprecedented AI speed and scalability, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint research center of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, in partnership with Cerebras Systems and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), has deployed Neocortex, an innovative computing platform that accelerates scientific discovery by vastly shortening the time required for deep learning training and inference, fosters greater integration of deep AI models with scientific workflows, and provides promising hardware for the development of more efficient algorithms for artificial intelligence and graph analytics. Neocortex advances knowledge by accelerating scientific research, enabling development of more accurate models and use of larger training data, scaling model parallelism to unprecedented levels, and focusing on human productivity by simplifying tuning and hyperparameter optimization to create a transformative hardware and software platform for the exploration of new frontiers. Neocortex has been integrated with PSC’s complementary infrastructure. This papers shares experiences, decisions, and findings made in that process. The system is serving science and engineering users via an early user access program. Valuable artifacts developed during the integration phase have been made available via a public repository and have been consulted by other AI system deployments that have seen Neocortex as an inspiration. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) has immense potential spanning research and industry. AI applications abound and are expanding rapidly, yet the methods, performance, and understanding of AI are in their infancy. Researchers face vexing issues such as how to improve performance, transferability, reliability, comprehensibility, and how better to train AI models with only limited data. Future progress depends on advances in hardware accelerators, software frameworks, system and architectures, and creating cross-cutting expertise between scientific and AI domains. Open Compass is an exploratory research project to conduct academic pilot studies on an advanced engineering testbed for artificial intelligence, the Compass Lab, culminating in the development and publication of best practices for the benefit of the broad scientific community. Open Compass includes the development of an ontology to describe the complex range of existing and emerging AI hardware technologies and the identification of benchmark problems that represent different challenges in training deep learning models. These benchmarks are then used to execute experiments in alternative advanced hardware solution architectures. Here we present the methodology of Open Compass and some preliminary results on analyzing the effects of different GPU types, memory, and topologies for popular deep learning models applicable to image processing.