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  1. Composable infrastructure holds the promise of accelerating the pace of academic research and discovery by enabling researchers to tailor the resources of a machine (e.g., GPUs, storage, NICs), on-demand, to address application needs. We were first introduced to composable infrastructure in 2018, and at the same time, there was growing demand among our College of Engineering faculty for GPU systems for data science, artificial intelligence / machine learning / deep learning, and visualization. Many purchased their own individual desktop or deskside systems, a few pursued more costly cloud and HPC solutions, and others looked to the College or campus computer center for GPU resources which, at the time, were scarce. After surveying the diverse needs of our faculty and studying product offerings by a few nascent startups in the composable infrastructure sector, we applied for and received a grant from the National Science Foundation in November 2019 to purchase a mid-scale system, configured to our specifications, for use by faculty and students for research and research training. This paper describes our composable infrastructure solution and implementation for our academic community. Given how modern workflows are progressively moving to containers and cloud frameworks (using Kubernetes) and to programming notebooks (primarily Jupyter), both for ease of use and for ensuring reproducible experiments, we initially adapted these tools for our system. We have since made it simpler to use our system, and now provide our users with a public facing JupyterHub server. We also added an expansion chassis to our system to enable composable co-location, which is a shared central architecture in which our researchers can insert and integrate specialized resources (GPUs, accelerators, networking cards, etc.) needed for their research. In February 2020, installation of our system was finalized and made operational and we began providing access to faculty in the College of Engineering. Now, two years later, it is used by over 40 faculty and students plus some external collaborators for research and research training. Their use cases and experiences are briefly described in this paper. Composable infrastructure has proven to be a useful computational system for workload variability, uneven applications, and modern workflows in academic environments. 
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  2. In today’s Big Data era, data scientists require modern workflows to quickly analyze large-scale datasets using complex codes to maintain the rate of scientific progress. These scientists often rely on available campus resources or off-the-shelf computational systems for their applications. Unified infrastructure or over-provisioned servers can quickly become bottlenecks for specific tasks, wasting time and resources. Composable infrastructure helps solve these problems by providing users with new ways to increase resource utilization. Composable infrastructure disaggregates a computer’s components – CPU, GPU (accelerators), storage and networking – into fluid pools of resources, but typically relies upon infrastructure engineers to architect individual machines. Infrastructure is either managed with specialized command-line utilities, user interfaces or specification files. These management models are cumbersome and difficult to incorporate into data-science workflows. We developed a high-level software API, Composastructure, which, when integrated into modern workflows, can be used by infrastructure engineers as well as data scientists to reorganize composable resources on demand. Composastructure enables infrastructures to be programmable, secure, persistent and reproducible. Our API composes machines, frees resources, supports multi-rack operations, and includes a Python module for Jupyter Notebooks. 
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  3. The graph convolutional network (GCN) has recently achieved promising performance of 3D human pose estimation (HPE) by modeling the relationship among body parts. However, most prior GCN approaches suffer from two main drawbacks. First, they share a feature transformation for each node within a graph convolution layer. This prevents them from learning different relations between different body joints. Second, the graph is usually defined according to the human skeleton and is suboptimal because human activities often exhibit motion patterns beyond the natural connections of body joints. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel Modulated GCN for 3D HPE. It consists of two main components: weight modulation and affinity modulation. Weight modulation learns different modulation vectors for different nodes so that the feature transformations of different nodes are disentangled while retaining a small model size. Affinity modulation adjusts the graph structure in a GCN so that it can model additional edges beyond the human skeleton. We investigate several affinity modulation methods as well as the impact of regularizations. Rigorous ablation study indicates both types of modulation improve performance with negligible overhead. Compared with state-of-the-art GCNs for 3D HPE, our approach either significantly reduces the estimation errors, e.g., by around 10%, while retaining a small model size or drastically reduces the model size, e.g., from 4.22M to 0.29M (a 14.5× reduction), while achieving comparable performance. Results on two benchmarks show our Modulated GCN outperforms some recent states of the art. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhimingZo/Modulated-GCN. 
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  5. In today's Big Data era, data scientists require new computational instruments in order to quickly analyze large-scale datasets using complex codes and quicken the rate of scientific progress. While Federally-funded computer resources, from supercomputers to clouds, are beneficial, they are often limiting - particularly for deep learning and visualization - as they have few Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). GPUs are at the center of modern high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, efficiently performing mathematical operations that can be massively parallelized, speeding up codes used for deep learning, visualization and image processing, more so than general-purpose microprocessors, or Central Processing Units (CPUs). The University of Illinois at Chicago is acquiring a much-in-demand GPU-based instrument, COMPaaS DLV - COMposable Platform as a Service Instrument for Deep Learning & Visualization, based on composable infrastructure, an advanced architecture that disaggregates the underlying compute, storage, and network resources for scaling needs, but operates as a single cohesive infrastructure for management and workload purposes. We are experimenting with a small system and learning a great deal about composability, and we believe COMPaaS DLV users will benefit from the varied workflow that composable infrastructure allows. 
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