Argonne Deploys New Groq System to ALCF AI Testbed, Providing AI Accelerator Access to Researchers Globally

Groq, an artificial intelligence (AI) solutions company, and the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory announced that Groq hardware is now available to researchers through the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility’s (ALCF) AI Testbed. The ALCF is a DOE Office of Science user facility that provides high-performance computing (HPC) resources and AI technologies for open science.

The Groq software and hardware ecosystem accelerates time to solution for complex AI problems, in particular inference. Using the GroqRack™ now deployed at Argonne, researchers working on critical challenges such as fusion energy, material design, imaging sciences, and drug discovery will benefit from the Groq system’s advantages, such as improved performance for a wide range of AI models.

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“Standing up a GroqRack at Argonne National Laboratory reflects both the hard work of the Groq team and our strong partnership with Argonne, which will provide researchers the flexibility they need to innovate and push the boundaries of what’s possible with the ALCF AI Testbed,” said Jonathan Ross, CEO and founder of Groq.

Groq will be particularly useful in advancing Argonne’s efforts to develop and support an integrated research infrastructure that seamlessly integrates advanced computing resources with experimental facilities, such as light sources and fusion experiments, to accelerate the pace of discovery.

Registration is now open for the early December Groq AI Workshop. This hands-on training will introduce users, including university, national lab, and industry researchers working on open science, to the Groq system deployed at the ALCF AI Testbed for use in their science campaigns.

Michael E. Papka, ALCF Director, and Deputy Associate Lab Director for Argonne’s Computing, Environment, and Life Sciences Directorate shared, “Inference is a critical part of leveraging AI for science as it allows researchers to use trained machine learning models to make predictions or discover patterns in complex data. Incorporating Groq inference-based solutions into the ALCF AI Testbed further strengthens our portfolio of AI accelerator offerings to our research community.”

Argonne researchers are using the Groq AI platform to improve predictive capabilities in real-time for fusion energy science, helping to identify a safe operating region for plasma within a tokamak. The team is also exploring how to build workflows for fusion applications to connect traditional HPC to AI accelerators to mitigate large-scale disruptions in burning plasmas in experimental tokamak systems.

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In another effort, Argonne and Groq partnered to advance COVID-19 drug discovery by accelerating the time to results from days to minutes by using AI models to help identify high-potential lead compounds to be used in clinical therapy trials. This same technique is being deployed in cancer drug discovery.

Aileen Black, President of Groq Government & Sales Public Sector, commented, “We’re thrilled to build upon our successful partnership with Argonne and collaborate with other DOE labs to advance LLM innovation. Our drug discovery work was just the beginning–we’re committed to enabling energy-efficient and scalable AI solutions for a sustainable computing future.”

The ALCF AI Testbed’s GroqRack compute cluster is open globally to researchers in academia, industry, or national labs. Anyone interested in using the system can submit project proposals via the ALCF’s Director’s Discretionary Program.

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