PATh Becomes NAIRR Pilot Service Provider for AI Workloads
February 27, 2025Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh) is now a service provider for the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot Project.
The Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh) project provides allocatable services to support the entire life cycle of AI workloads–training data generation, training data cleaning, model training, and inference (prediction) using AI models. As of February 20th, PATh is now a service provider for the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot Project.
PATh Services for AI
PATh services are designed to address throughput-oriented workloads that consist of ensembles of jobs (such as hyperparameter optimization workloads). The ensembles are managed by a network of Access Points and can connect to capacity at
- The purpose-built PATh facility
- The OSPool
- or another ACCESS/NAIRR allocation owned by the PI
The PATh Facility includes dedicated access to:
- 10 machines with 4 40GB A100 GPUs 1.6TB of NVMe, and 512 GB RAM
- 68 machines with 64 AMD EPYC cores (AMD 7513), 1.6TB of NVMe, and 256 GB RAM each.
Note: Individual jobs can use up to all the GPUs available on a single machine.
Access NAIRR Resources via PATh
To access NAIRR resources on PATh, AI researchers first need to acquire a NAIRR allocation. PATh can assist researchers preparing a NAIRR allocation proposal and are encouraged to talk to the PATh team at nairr@path-cc.io.
NAIRR resources are available to:
- US-based researchers, students, and educators
- US-based institutions including academic institutions, non-profits, federal agencies or federally funded R&D centers, state, local, or tribal agencies, startups and small businesses with federal grants
- Read more on NAIRR Pilot Website
The NAIRR Pilot aims to address researcher needs by increasing access to AI resources and advance its main goals, namely to: spur innovation, develop workforce talent, improve capacity, and advance safe, secure, and trustworthy AI in research and society.
Inaugural NAIRR Pilot Meeting
The week of February 17, 2025 was the inaugural NAIRR Pilot meeting in Arlington, VA—an opportunity to discuss this initiative and to highlight resource offerings, AI, science, education innovation outcomes, and the NAIRR Pilot’s progress in democratizing access to AI resources. On behalf of PATh, team members Miron Livny (PI), Brain Bockelman (co-PI), and Ian Ross (Systems Integration Developer) all attended. This meeting led to the official announcement that PATh is a service provider for the NAIRR Pilot Project.
As a NAIRR service provider, PATh addresses researcher needs by providing a range of services needed to access, run, and test AI-related infrastructure. PATh services include a dedicated facilitation support team, services that make data distribution easier, and dedicatedaccess to GPU computing capacity. PATh furthers NAIRR’s purposes of spurring innovation, developing workforce talent, improving capacity, and advancing safe, secure, and trustworthy AI in research and society.
What is NAAIR?
The purpose of the NAIRR Pilot is to spur innovation, develop workforce talent, improve capacity, and advance safe, secure, and trustworthy AI in research and society. The NAIRR Pilot addresses researcher needs by increasing access to a different ensemble of AI-related infrastructure resources including computational capabilities.
AI innovation is an emerging discipline with the capability to accelerate global innovation, discovery, and aid existing research projects that tackle critical societal and global challenges. Despite these potentials, many public researchers lack access to these critical resources and training regarding these resources—inhibiting further advancement needed to conduct their research activities and to train the next generation of researchers.
The NAIRR Pilot Project is a concept responding to this access gap, aiming to connect U.S researchers and educators with trustworthy AI resources and the computational, data, soft\ware, training, and educational resources to advance research, discovery, and innovation needed to advance AI research and research that employs AI—promoting shared national research infrastructure.
NAIRR is a National Science Foundation (NSF) vision that currently supports over 250+ projects and is a growing pilot that, in its first phase, is providing researchers and educators with the ability to access advanced computing for AI researchers and access to a growing list of AI-specific resources.
What is PATh?:
The Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh) project is funded by the NSF to advance High Throughput Computing (HTC) and its impact on research. PATh brings together two entities with a strong history of supporting dHTC-enabled research: CHTC and the OSG Consortium to address the needs of the rapidly growing community of faculty and students who are embracing these technologies and services to advance their research.
Read more about PATh services for NAIRR, including facilitation support, data distribution, and computing resources, here.