Morgridge and UW–Madison team up to provide data services for the AI era

The National Science Foundation announced yesterday $83 million of investments for data systems and services to shape a future, AI-capable data backbone of the national cyberinfrastructure. The Morgridge Institute for Research, along with UW–Madison’s College of Computing & Artificial Intelligence and five other partner universities, was selected to lead one of the two flagship projects, the Fabric for AI-Driven Science (FabAID). FabAID, a 5-year, $24.5M project, supports over 15 full-time employees at the Madison campus builds a fabric of services to accelerate data-intensive and AI-driven science.

Morgridge brings together a team led by Investigator Brian Bockelman alongside Anthony Gitter and Miron Livny at Morgridge, AnHai Doan at University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Jason Simms at Swarthmore College. Bockelman, also a leader on the NSF Pelican and PATh Projects, says the work will “build on the principles that we’ve been advancing for over 20 years at the Center for High Throughput Computing — principles like distributed systems, sharing across boundaries, and research computing facilitation.”

“We take that foundation and envision what those principles mean for the AI era. How do these apply? How do they work as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century?” he adds.

In the U.S., specialized expertise, data, and compute capacity is spread across institutions, small and large, well-funded or underfunded, located in all 50 states. Against this backdrop, the science community struggles with sharing, discovering, moving, and delivering data to the processing power needed to extract knowledge and power discoveries.

The vision of FabAID is to weave together distributed data, AI, and computational services to reach the national education and research communities and address these vexing problems. This national fabric connects data repositories, computing resources and cyberinfrastructure, including the emerging National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource, or NAIRR.

Livny, Morgridge’s chief technology officer and John Morgridge professor of computer science at UW–Madison, notes the award is in line with the vision and mission of the Morgridge Institute. “High-quality data, especially in this age of AI, is a critical element of both medical research and workforce development,” Livny says. “The institute is committed to providing researchers and educators with state-of-the-art data and computing capabilities.”

FabAID builds on the decades of partnership between the OSG Consortium (OSG) and the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC). CHTC, located within the newly formed UW–Madison College of Computing & Artificial Intelligence, innovates methodologies, software tools, and services for throughput computing — most notably Pelican and HTCondor. FabAID takes these partnerships into the AI era.

• View the original source press release on the Morgridge Institute for Research website.