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“DIY” and “supercomputer” aren’t phrases sometimes used collectively.
However a do-it-yourself supercomputer is precisely what college students constructed at Southern Methodist College, in Dallas, utilizing 16 NVIDIA Jetson Nano modules, 4 energy provides, greater than 60 handmade wires, a community swap and a few cooling followers.
The mission, dubbed SMU’s “child supercomputer,” goals to assist educate those that could by no means get hands-on with a normal-sized supercomputer, which might generally fill a warehouse, or be locked in an information middle or within the cloud.
As an alternative, this mini supercomputer suits comfortably on a desk, permitting college students to tinker with it and study what makes up a cluster. A contact display screen shows a dashboard with the standing of all of its nodes.
“We began this mission to reveal the nuts and bolts of what goes into a pc cluster,” mentioned Eric Godat, crew lead for analysis and knowledge science within the inner IT group at SMU.
Subsequent week, the infant supercomputer will likely be on show at SC22, a supercomputing convention going down in Dallas, simply down the freeway from SMU.
The SMU crew will host a sales space to speak to researchers, distributors and college students concerning the college’s high-performance computing packages and the recent deployment of its NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD for AI-accelerated analysis.
Plus, in collaboration with Mark III Methods — a member of the NVIDIA Partner Network — the SMU Workplace of Info Expertise will present convention attendees with a tour of the campus knowledge middle to showcase the DGX SuperPOD in motion. Be taught particulars at SMU’s sales space #3834.
“We’re bringing the infant supercomputer to the convention to get individuals to cease by and ask, ‘Oh, what’s that?’” mentioned Godat, who served as a mentor for Conner Ozenne, a senior pc science main at SMU and one of many brains behind the cluster.
“I began learning pc science in highschool as a result of programming fulfilled the overseas language requirement,” mentioned Ozenne, who now goals to combine AI and machine studying with net design for his profession. “Doing these first tasks as a highschool freshman, I instantly knew that is what I needed to do for the remainder of my life.”
Ozenne is a STAR at SMU — a Scholar Expertise Affiliate in Residence. He first pitched the design and price range for the infant supercomputer to Godat’s crew two summers in the past. With a grant of a pair thousand {dollars} and an entire lot of enthusiasm, he set to work.
Beginning of a Child Supercomputer
Ozenne, in collaboration with one other scholar, constructed the infant supercomputer from scratch.
“They needed to discover ways to strip wires and never shock themselves — they put collectively every thing from the facility provides to the networking all by themselves,” Godat mentioned. With a smile, he added, “We solely began one small hearth.”
The primary iteration was a large number of wires on a desk connecting the NVIDIA Jetson Nano developer kits, with cardboard packing containers as heatsinks, Ozenne mentioned.
“We selected to make use of NVIDIA Jetson modules as a result of no different small compute gadgets have onboard GPUs, which might allow us to sort out extra AI and machine studying issues,” he added.
Quickly Ozenne gave the infant supercomputer case upgrades: from cardboard to foam to acrylic plates, which he laser minimize from 3D vector information in SMU’s innovation gymnasium, a makerspace for college students.
“It was my first time doing all of this, and it was an awesome studying expertise, with plenty of enjoyable nights within the lab,” Ozenne mentioned.
A Work in Progress
In simply 4 months, the mission went from nothing to one thing that resembled a supercomputer, in response to Ozenne. However the mission is ongoing.
The crew is now growing the mini cluster’s software program stack, with the assistance of the NVIDIA JetPack software development kit, and prepping it to perform some small-scale machine studying duties. Plus, the infant supercomputer may degree up with the lately introduced NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano modules.
“Our NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD simply opened up on campus, so we don’t really want this child supercomputer to be an precise compute surroundings,” Godat mentioned. “However the mini cluster is an efficient instructing device for the way all these items actually works — it lets college students experiment with stripping the wires, managing a parallel file system, reimaging playing cards and deploying cluster software program.”
SMU’s NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD, which incorporates 160 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, is in an alpha-rollout section for school, who’re utilizing it to coach AI fashions for molecular dynamics, computational chemistry, astrophysics, quantum mechanics and a slew of different analysis subjects.
Godat collaborates with the NVIDIA DGX crew to flexibly configure the DGX SuperPOD to help tens of various AI, machine studying, knowledge processing and HPC tasks.
“I adore it, as a result of daily is completely different — I may very well be engaged on an AI-related mission within the faculty of the humanities, and the following day I’m within the legislation faculty, and the following I’m within the particle physics division,” mentioned Godat, who himself has a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics from SMU.
“There are purposes for AI in all places,” Ozenne agreed.
Be taught extra from Godat and different consultants on designing an AI Heart of Excellence on this NVIDIA GTC session available on demand.
Be a part of NVIDIA at SC22 to discover associate cubicles on the present flooring and have interaction with digital content material all week — together with a particular handle, demos and different classes.
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