Cloud Computing

Call for Proposals: BU AI Research Resource Program (BU-AIRR)

Apply for access to high-end computational resources by Nov. 16, 2024

Learn more and submit proposals here.

The BU Office of Research and the Hariri Institute for Computing have established a new resource program to support artificial intelligence (AI) research at Boston University: the BU AI Research Resource Program (BU-AIRR).

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. The Mass Open Cloud Alliance, based at the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, is offering cloud services for research through the New England Research Cloud (NERC). NERC is offering 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.

In an effort to enable and seed large-scale AI research, Boston University is establishing a program to provide credits for compute time on these high-end GPU resources. A pool of funds has been established through contributions from the Hariri Institute, the Red Hat Collaboratory based at the Institute, the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, the College of Engineering, and the Office of Research.

Learn more and apply here.

Big data problems require the on-demand, high-performance computing resources offered by cloud systems. Our research teams are actively developing new cloud computing platforms to provide leading-edge services for scientific computing.

Related Initiatives

MOC Alliance: A regional structure, centered around The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC), to create an open production cloud that provides domain researchers with predictable low cost resources and facilitator support while enabling academic researchers and developers in the open source community to participate in the kind of close interactions between research, development, and production operations that has resulted in so much innovation in today’s public clouds.

Red Hat Collaboratory: A partnership between Red Hat and Boston University, the Red Hat Collaboratory connects the BU community with industry practitioners and aims to advance research focused on emerging technologies, including cloud computing services.