Empire AI

Overview

Empire AI is a New York State initiative launched by Governor Kathy Hochul in April 2024. It is a collaboration of New York State's top public and private universities. The mission of Empire AI is to equip New York's leading research institutions with high-performance computing resources for responsible artificial intelligence research and development.

In addition to RPI, other members are Columbia University, Cornell University, CUNY, SUNY, NYU, University of Rochester, RIT, Flatiron Institute, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Timeline

The Alpha system came online in October 2024. The Beta system is expected to be available April 2026. The Gamma facility and system are expected in 2027. Updates to the schedule can be found at Empire AI.

Hardware specifications

Alpha System

24 HGX Nodes

  • Nodes alphagpu01-alphagpu18
    • 8 H100 80 GB GPUs per node
  • Nodes alphagpu19-alphagpu24
    • 8 H200 80 GB GPUs per node
  • 10-400 Gb/s ConnectX-7 NIC Cards (8 for IB and 2 for Ethernet)
  • 30 TB NVMe caching space
  • 2 TB of system memory
  • 23 of the nodes serve as the main computational platform. The 24th node is primarily to serve development, testing, etc.

Non-blocking NDR fabric cabled for rail configuration

  • 8 network switches, 96 optical connections

4 service nodes

  • 2 login nodes and 2 cluster management nodes (NVIDIA Base Command with licenses for all gear)

2 data transfer nodes

2 PB of DDN Storage

  • 4 x 720 TB Flash storage (training data, snap shots)

2 PB of VAST Storage

  • home directories

Beta System (Expected Late April 2026)

 

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