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Today’s landscape of computational science is evolving rapidly, with a need for new, flexible, and responsive supercomputing platforms for addressing the growing areas of artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics (DA) and convergent collaborative research. To support this community, we designed and deployed the Bridges-2 platform. Building on our highly successful Bridges supercomputer, which was a high-performance computing resource supporting new communities and complex workflows, Bridges-2 supports traditional and nontraditional research communities and applications; integrates new technologies for converged, scalable high-performance computing (HPC), AI, and data analytics; prioritizes researcher productivity and ease of use; and provides an extensible architecture for interoperation with complementary data intensive projects, campuses, and clouds. In this report, we describe Bridges-2’s hardware and configuration, user environments, and systems support and present the results of the successful Early User Program. 

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.