The University of Georgia (UGA) is investing $2.4 million into its Advanced Computing Resource Center to deploy 26 GPUs and three 3TB memory nodes for its Sapelo2 HPC cluster.

The new compute nodes will be made up of Nvidia hardware; a 12-quad H100, a two-quad A100, and a 12-quad L4.

Due to be fully operational by the fall semester of 2024, UGA will use the increased compute availability to support its research efforts across a variety of disciplines, including artificial intelligence, data science, and bioinformatics.

Housed at the Boyd Data Center on the university’s campus, the Sapelo2 system has more than 38,000 cores spanning general-purpose AMD Epyc and Intel Xeon Skylake nodes and high-memory Epyc and Intel Xeon Broadwell nodes.

“The investment will allow UGA researchers to experiment with AI approaches more rapidly, test new ideas, and refine AI models much faster,” said Guy Cormier, director of research computing for the university’s Enterprise Information Technology Services team.

“Overall, the impact of these resources on AI research at UGA will be overwhelmingly positive, accelerating the pace of discovery, enabling researchers to tackle more ambitious problems, and fostering collaborative projects across multiple disciplines.”

Alan Dorsey, associate CIO for research in EITS and professor of physics at UGA, added that this investment will allow the university “to further expand and accelerate computational services to the AI and data-intensive research community.”

The Georgia Advanced Computing Resource Center was jointly established by the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology.

Located at the Boyd Data Center, the university’s advanced computing environment is comprised of high-performance computing and networking infrastructure, in addition to a collection of scientific, engineering, and business applications, and consulting and training services.