Equipment: MRI: Track 2 Acquisition of an Advanced Infrastructure to Accelerate Impact of AI Through Applications and Innovation for Wyoming (AI4WY)

The AI4WY (Acquisition of an Advanced Infrastructure to Accelerate Impact of AI Through Applications and Innovation for Wyoming) project will acquire a state-of-the-art high-performance computing (HPC) system, significantly advancing the application and innovation of artificial intelligence and computational science across the University of Wyoming and the Rocky Mountain region. The instrument will enable the adoption and development of scalable scientific software for addressing grand-challenge problems characterized by big data and integrated modeling. This initiative strives to promote scientific progress and tackle pressing issues in four emphasized research domains with regional and national impact: environment, agriculture, society, and energy. By providing researchers with access to cutting-edge computing resources, AI4WY facilitates groundbreaking research and education, fostering collaborations among universities and expanding opportunities to serve the needs of all users, including those from under-served institutions, promoting the HPC ecosystem across the Rocky Mountain region. The AI4WY project will utilize a specialized HPC system featuring NVIDIA DGX GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, interconnected with NVIDIA InfiniBand and NVLink, and equipped with 400 terabytes of data storage. This infrastructure addresses critical computing challenges related to data movement and energy consumption through the Grace Hopper architecture, which integrates high-bandwidth coherent data transfers between CPU and GPU. AI4WY will germinate collaborative HPC research by serving researchers and educators at the University of Wyoming, Colorado State University (CSU), and the Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium (RMACC). Through this program, the University of Wyoming and Colorado State University are actively establishing formal research and training collaborations to focus on inter-state research problems, including agriculture, public health, society, energy, and tourism. A dedicated allocation of 15% of computing resources on the proposed instrument to CSU for research and training will promote these efforts. More broadly, the AI4WY project will also provide a 10% resource allocation to the Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium (RMACC), giving access to 33 institutions in the West, including some 45,000 academic staff, 160,000 graduates and 540,000 undergraduate students, and 15 non-R1 universities. This project is jointly funded by Office of Integrative Activities (OIA), the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), and Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.