MRI: Track 2 Acquisition of a GPU-Accelerated Computing Cluster for Computationally Intensive and AI Research in North Dakota

About This Grant

This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award funds the acquisition and deployment of Bison -- a GPU-accelerated high-performance computing system for computationally intensive and artificial intelligence (AI) research. Bison will transform the capabilities of North Dakota State University (NDSU) and of other institutions in the state of North Dakota to conduct leading-edge research which has implications in public policies, agriculture and food security, healthcare, energy, engineering, environment, quantum information science, among others. The new system will be a state-wide regional resource that provides faculty, staff, and students at all eleven institutions within the North Dakota University System and the five tribal colleges in North Dakota with needed infrastructure. Bison is crucial to the growing spectrum of research and training activities and will be used to foster collaboration with research and education partners within North Dakota and across the country, especially on AI research, and will thus contribute to efforts to democratize AI. The project will acquire, deploy, and operate a GPU-accelerated high-performance computing system architected for highly arithmetic-intensive and AI/machine learning processing. The instrument (Bison, named after the majestic American mammal) consists of a premier storage system built to support AI workflows and a GPU cluster for highly compute-intensive computation and AI training and inference tasks. At NDSU and fifteen other higher-education institutions in the state of North Dakota, the new instrument will enable leading-edge research in multiple science and engineering areas, including social sciences, computer science, bioinformatics, biomechanics, fluid dynamics, physics, chemistry, materials science, civil engineering, among others. It will also enable education and training of the next generation of scientists and engineers, technologists, and research computing users and professionals. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.