Original URL: https://www.aiwire.net/2025/01/06/ncsa-director-bill-gropp-on-sc24-focus-in-2025/
By Bill Gropp (NCSA, December 17, 2024)
2024 was an amazing year for NCSA. So much so it’s hard to know where to start our annual opportunity for reflection.
Just four short weeks ago, DeltaAI was accepted for production, officially launching our second U.S. National Science Foundation supercomputer in the last three years and cementing NCSA as a leading supporter of artificial intelligence research by providing the majority of GPU cycles for the NSF ACCESS program. We just received the early user-period survey and researchers were very happy with DeltaAI’s performance, the support we provided and even the documentation, which, during that period, is often patchworked together. A lot of interesting research has already been done on DeltaAI, so the system’s off to a really great start.
But our AI research support doesn’t end there. NCSA is positioned as a major partner in two new AI initiatives that have gained momentum in 2024.
Earlier this year, NCSA joined the newly launched National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot and our Delta system remains the prominent choice of NAIRR researchers as the most requested and most awarded resource in the initial round of awards. Congratulations are in order for NCSA Deputy Director John Towns and his team for playing a significant role in the NAIRR pilot’s early success. NCSA is also part of the NSF-Simons SkAI Institute. Led by by Northwestern University and announced in September, SkAI is a great example of the leadership NCSA has shown in digital astronomy while partnering with the University of Illinois astronomy department and other leading institutions in the Midwest. To read more, see https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/ncsa-director-bill-gropp-on-sc24-focus-in-2025/
The SkAI Institute is one of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Simons Foundation.
Information on National AI Institutes is available at aiinstitutes.org.
