The following email message was shared with Cornell University faculty and researchers on October 2, 2024.
Earlier this spring, New York State and six academic partners, including Cornell, committed to create Empire AI*, a GPU supercluster for AI and high-performance computing academic research. An early version of Empire AI’s research computing instrument, which we call “Alpha,” is coming online by early November 2024. The hardware specifications for Alpha are outlined at the end of this email message. While the ultimate Empire AI instrument will far outstrip Alpha’s specifications, we are excited that our research communities can now start to stress test this shared resource. With Alpha, we will be able to do research we otherwise could not at our individual institutions, and we will formulate processes for operating a shared cluster.
Empire AI Consortium, Inc. welcomes Cornell faculty and researchers at all our campuses in New York State to request time to run a research project using Alpha.
• HOW: Please submit brief work order requests (WORs) to Empire AI via this secure online form. This short form asks for a paragraph description of your research project and five questions about your resource needs.
• WHEN: You may submit your work order request starting October 3 through October 31, 2024. When you submit WORs within this time window has no bearing on when and whether the project is run on Alpha.
• WHAT: Research compute jobs can be of any CPU/GPU-scale and duration, given the hardware specifications, guidelines, and context below.
• WHY EARLY ADOPTERS: Alpha will be in start-up mode during its initial months of operation, meaning early users will be expected to help work out configuration issues, and ensure the necessary software is installed.
Here are some further guidelines and context:
• Empire AI will allocate resources for this initial phase of Alpha following these operating principles: To achieve equity of usage across the six academic systems sharing the instrument, and to maximize utilization of Alpha’s capacity.
• Priority will be given to projects that best harness the capabilities of Alpha.
• Depending on the total number of work orders submitted by any one academic institution and the distribution of work orders submitted among institutions, Empire AI may ask a university to prioritize its corresponding work order requests, following whatever procedure that academic institution chooses.
• When considering appropriate research data for use of Alpha, note that Alpha is neither HIPAA nor NIST-800-171 compliant.
• Empire AI expects to make Alpha available in this fashion for about one year (i.e., through approximately November 2025), subject to change with notice to the user community.
Consider this call for Empire AI WORs as just the first one. There may be subsequent calls as we gain more experience in using Alpha after this start-up phase. The process for soliciting work orders may change as well.
Finally, it is through the generosity of the Simons Foundation and its Flatiron Institute that Empire AI can so rapidly provide access to an initial instrument for our shared research use. Through these means, there are no institutional or user fees for running compute jobs on Alpha. We are piloting Alpha to understand user demand, usage patterns, classes of users, and types of jobs and workloads. Empire AI and Cornell will use our collective experience with Alpha to plan user fees and resource allocation for future builds of Empire AI.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask at empire-ai@cornell.edu.