Novosibirsk State University has launched the first stage of the Lavrentyev Supercomputer Center’s computing cluster. This cluster is currently located in the NSU academic building and will move to the NSU Research Center when it is completed as part of the second stage of the world-class NSU campus project. With a computing capacity of 360 teraflops (trillions of floating-point operations per second), it surpasses all similar servers in academic organizations beyond the Urals. The new cluster is designed to work with large language models and generative artificial intelligence.
Among the first projects to use the computing power of the new cluster are Artificial Intelligence projects implemented for NSU Research Center industrial partners. More specifically, various video analytics sensors developed for Rostelecom that are transport detectors, detectors of non-standard behavior for schools, etc.
Alexey Okunev explained,
This server is equipped with graphic accelerators that allow for multiple parallel calculations. It has the necessary amount of graphic video memory so that we can use modern large language models on the ChatGPT and GigaChat level, fine-tune and customize them to solve specific problems. The term “non-standard behavior” is quite difficult to formulate algorithmically. The problem of recognizing non-standard types of behavior and preventing them can be solved using advanced artificial intelligence technologies that can be provided by large language models. This should increase the accuracy and robustness (resistance to interference) of our models.
The computing cluster also opens up additional opportunities for the implementation of new educational programs. This includes launching “Machine Learning” at the NSU “Digital Department”. Students will be trained on real projects that use artificial intelligence technologies for customers that are industrial partners from various sectors.
