Over at the NVIDIA blog, Bob Sherbin writes that an NVIDIA GPU-powered supercomputer named “Rosie” is at the heart of a new computational science facility at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Unique to MSOE, the supercomputer will be available to undergraduate students, offering them the ability to apply their learning in a hands-on environment to prepare for their careers. Thanks to the university’s corporate partnerships, students will access this high performance computing to solve real-world problems in their course work.
Three decades and hundreds of millions of lines of computer code after graduating from the Milwaukee School of Engineering, NVIDIA’s Dwight Diercks returned today to celebrate a donation that will put his alma mater at the forefront of AI undergraduate education. Diercks’ $34 million gift, the largest from an alum in MSOE’s 116-year history, is the keystone in the school’s efforts to infuse its engineering program with artificial intelligence. Two years ago, MSOE became one of the very few programs, together with Carnegie Mellon, to offer a computer science degree focused on AI.
Housed in a glass-walled area within the newly constructed four-story Diercks Hall, the new NVIDIA-powered AI supercomputer includes three NVIDIA DGX-1 pods, each with eight NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, and 20 servers each with four NVIDIA T4 GPUs. The nodes are joined together by Mellanox networking fabric and share 200TB of network-attached storage. Rare among supercomputers in higher education, the system —which provides 8.2 petaflops of deep learning performance — will be used for teaching undergrad classes.
We knew MSOE needed a supercomputer and one that can expand to scale out for students and scale up for local industries and professors,” Diercks said. In an emotional speech, he thanked a high school teacher, MSOE professor and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang for reinforcing what his parents taught him about the importance of hard work and continuous learning.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who delivered a keynote after the ceremony, called AI the fourth industrial revolution that will sweep across the work of virtually every industry. MSOE’s new AI push and supercomputer will help it enable generations of computer scientists trained for tomorrow’s challenges.
MSOE now has the single most important instrument of knowledge today,” Huang said, delivering the first address in the NVIDIA auditorium. “Without access to the correct instrument, you can’t access knowledge.”
