UMass today rolled out its new GPU cluster – Gypsum – aimed at deep learning. Like many institutions, UMass is seeking to attract Ph.D. students drawn to deep learning and artificial intelligence. At 400 GPUs, Gypsum is on the large side for academic GPU clusters according the university.
The new systems will be housed at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, Mass., and is the result of a five-year, $5 million grant to the campus from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative made last year. It represents a one-third match to a $15 million gift supporting data science and cybersecurity research from the MassMutual Foundation of Springfield.
Gypsum is reported to have 400 GPUs from NVIDIA installed on 100 nodes. Of note, the M40 is based on NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture and features high single precision performance, useful in training DL networks. Erik Learned-Miller of the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) says this is the first year of the grant, during which about $2 million has been spent on two clusters: “Gypsum” and a smaller cluster of traditional CPU machines dubbed “Swarm II.”
Andrew McCallum, professor and founder of the Center for Data Science at UMass Amherst, says, “This is a transformational expansion of opportunity and represents a whole new era for the center and our college. Access to multi-GPU clusters of this scale and speed strengthens our position as a destination for deep learning research and sets us apart among universities nationally.” UMass currently has research projects that apply deep learning techniques to computational ecology, face recognition, graphics, natural language processing and many other areas.
Link to release (UMass Amherst Boosts Deep Learning Research with Powerful New GPU Cluster): http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/umass-amherst-boosts-deep-learning