Announcing Engineering Initiative for Artificial Intelligence
College of Engineering Faculty and Staff:
Artificial Intelligence (AI), including machine learning, synthetic vision, decision making, smart systems, etc., is reshaping every aspect of society and industry. Progress in the science and technologies associated with big data, computational power, sensors, and interconnectivity have enabled unprecedented advances which will influence all aspects of our research and educational endeavors. The College of Engineering must take a leadership role in fostering the AI capabilities for the University of Iowa campus.
To meet this critical need the College of Engineering (CoE) is announcing an Engineering Initiative for Artificial Intelligence. The first tangible step in this young initiative is the establishment of a 45-seat GPU-enabled classroom which opened this semester. This facility supports cutting-edge courses on GPU-computing, deep learning, and AI. A development lab with 8 GPU-enabled workstations (4622 SC) has also been established to serve as a bridge between AI education, research, and high performance computing. Teaming with Information Technology Services (ITS) provides state-of-the-art high-performance computing on campus, 23 GPU-enabled nodes which are now available bringing the total number of GPU accelerators in the system to 118. ITS is also working to improve software support for related applications such as the recent deployment of an optimized version of Tensorflow. Four of these nodes (160 cores, 16 GPU-accelerators) were funded by Engineering and are functionally interlinked with the AI-development lab. Moreover, the enthusiastic endorsement from the Iowa Informatics Initiative creates further synergies and offers additional opportunities to extend interdisciplinary AI collaborations across campus. A combination of student computer-fees and private donations was used in the enabling stage of this Engineering AI-education and research initiative.
Professor Sonka will serve as the Director of the Engineering Initiative for Artificial Intelligence with a plan to broaden this initiative to encompass the entire campus, and enhance the role of AI in University-wide interdisciplinary research.
--
Alec Scranton
Dean, College of Engineering