PIPages
Labs

Leif Nelson

Boise State University, ID·Computer Science

Modern artificial intelligence work, from training language models to simulating physical systems, depends on access to specialized hardware that most campuses do not have in sufficient quantity. This project builds out that shared capacity at Boise State University, adding six compute nodes each holding four NVIDIA L40S graphics processing units, which are the accelerator chips that make large-scale machine learning training and inference practical.

Fields

Computer Science

Education Research

Engineering

Topics

cyberinfrastructure

research computing

GPU cluster

Grants
1 known grant, through Jun 2027

What they work on

  1. Deploy and integrate six compute nodes, each with four NVIDIA L40S GPUs, into the existing campus research computing cluster to support data science, machine learning, and AI workloads.
  2. Support science drivers on the new hardware, including fundamental large language model research, simulation of energy-efficient hardware, and modeling of weather, oceans, and materials.
  3. Incorporate the cyberinfrastructure into coursework in data science, natural language processing, and AI, including instructional use of generative AI tools, and build a campus community of practice around AI.
  4. Extend access to the AI-optimized resource statewide via the C3+3 consortium with Idaho National Laboratory and Idaho's research universities, and nationally through the Open Science Grid Consortium.

More about the research

The new hardware updates infrastructure supporting data science, machine learning, and AI, and is integrated with the university's existing research computing cluster rather than standing alone.

Why it matters

Research and training in machine learning are limited at many institutions by the cost of accelerator hardware. By adding shared GPU capacity and opening it to partners across Idaho and to national users through the Open Science Grid, this project could broaden who can run AI-scale computations, while giving students in data science and natural language processing courses direct experience with the hardware such work requires.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

CC* Compute-Campus: Scaling Hardware for AI Research and Education (SHARE)

NSF · Dec 2024 – Jun 2027

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The school

Boise State University: 10 labs on PI Pages, $58M a year on research, 64 research doctorates a year.

More about Boise State University

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