APS Senior Physicists Group Talk: Accelerating Artificial Intelligence through High Performance Computing
Abstract
The convergence of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) is driving unprecedented advances in solving global grand challenges. From training foundation models and large language models (LLMs) that require thousands of GPUs, to accelerating graph neural networks for detecting disease patterns in human populations, protecting elections from cyber-threats, and improving power grid resilience – the computational demands are extraordinary. These challenges extend beyond traditional HPC applications, introducing new complexities in data locality, scalability, and system architecture. The massive computational requirements of modern AI models, often exceeding hundreds of petaFLOPS during training, demand novel approaches to distributed computing, memory hierarchies, and interconnect technologies. This talk explores the symbiotic relationship between AI and HPC, examining how advances in parallel computing architectures and algorithms are enabling the next generation of AI systems, while AI-driven approaches are transforming how we design and optimize HPC systems. Bader will discuss cutting-edge research in AI acceleration, scalable training and inference techniques, and the future of heterogeneous computing architectures needed to power the next generation of artificial intelligence.
Biography:
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor and founder of the Department of Data Science and inaugural Director of the Institute for Data Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Prior to this, he served as founding Professor and Chair of the School of Computational Science and Engineering, College of Computing, at Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Bader is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, AAAS, and SIAM; a recipient of the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award; and the 2022 Innovation Hall of Fame inductee of the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering. He advises the White House, most recently on the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) and Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem (FACE). Bader is a leading expert in solving global grand challenges in science, engineering, computing, and data science. His interests are at the intersection of high-performance computing and real-world applications, including cybersecurity, massive-scale analytics, and computational genomics, and he has co-authored over 400 scholarly papers and has best paper awards from ISC, IEEE HPEC, and IEEE/ACM SC. Dr. Bader is Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing and previously served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He serves on the leadership team of Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub as the inaugural chair of the Seed Fund Steering Committee. In 2012, Bader was the inaugural recipient of University of Maryland’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award. In 2014, Bader received the Outstanding Senior Faculty Research Award from Georgia Tech. Bader has also served as Director of the Sony-Toshiba-IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Broadband Engine Processor and Director of an NVIDIA GPU Center of Excellence. In 1998, Bader built the first Linux supercomputer that led to a high-performance computing (HPC) revolution, and Hyperion Research estimates that the total economic value of Linux supercomputing pioneered by Bader has been over $100 trillion over the past 25 years. Bader is a cofounder of the Graph500 List for benchmarking “Big Data” computing platforms. He is recognized as a “RockStar” of High Performance Computing by InsideHPC and as HPCwire’s People to Watch in 2012 and 2014.
David A. Bader
Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at New Jersey Institute of Technology.