Powering AI Research
The BU AI Research Resource (BU-AIRR) is a resource program established by the Office of Research and the Hariri Institute for Computing aimed at enabling and seeding large-scale AI research at Boston University by funding access to powerful production cloud resources of the New England Research Cloud (NERC).
AI research increasingly requires large amounts of computational resources (in the form of Graphics Processing Units – GPUs) that in their most advanced form have a cost that is beyond the reach of individual research groups. As a result, much of the advanced AI research to train large deep neural network models is performed on the cloud. NERC offers access to top-of-the-line CPUs, storage solutions, a number of Nvidia A100 GPUs, and has recently acquired 192 Nvidia H100 GPUs that are expected to go on-line in December 2024. NERC is a fee/hour service available to any BU researcher, and researchers from several other institutions.