NSF

Georgia Tech to Build $20M National AI Supercomputer

admin — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 18:58:41 +0000

Georgia Tech to Build $20M National AI Supercomputer admin Wed, 07/16/2025 - 14:58

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Georgia Tech and its partners $20 million to build a powerful new supercomputer that will use artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate scientific breakthroughs.

Called Nexus, the system will be one of the most advanced AI-focused research tools in the U.S. Nexus will help scientists tackle urgent challenges such as developing new medicines, advancing clean energy, understanding how the brain works, and driving manufacturing innovations.

“Georgia Tech is proud to be one of the nation’s leading sources of the AI talent and technologies that are powering a revolution in our economy,” said Ángel Cabrera, president of Georgia Tech. “It’s fitting we’ve been selected to host this new supercomputer, which will support a new wave of AI-centered innovation across the nation. We’re grateful to the NSF, and we are excited to get to work.”

Designed from the ground up for AI, Nexus will give researchers across the country access to advanced computing tools through a simple, user-friendly interface. It will support work in many fields, including climate science, health, aerospace, and robotics.

“The Nexus system's novel approach combining support for persistent scientific services with more traditional high-performance computing will enable new science and AI workflows that will accelerate the time to scientific discovery,” said Katie Antypas, National Science Foundation director of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. “We look forward to adding Nexus to NSF's portfolio of advanced computing capabilities for the research community.”

Nexus Supercomputer — In Simple Terms

Built for the future of science: Nexus is designed to power the most demanding AI research — from curing diseases, to understanding how the brain works, to engineering quantum materials.

Blazing fast: Nexus can crank out over 400 quadrillion operations per second — the equivalent of everyone in the world continuously performing 50 million calculations every second.

Massive brain plus memory: Nexus combines the power of AI and high-performance computing with 330 trillion bytes of memory to handle complex problems and giant datasets.

Storage: Nexus will feature 10 quadrillion bytes of flash storage, equivalent to about 10 billion reams of paper. Stacked, that’s a column reaching 500,000 km high — enough to stretch from Earth to the moon and a third of the way back.

Supercharged connections: Nexus will have lightning-fast connections to move data almost instantaneously, so researchers do not waste time waiting.

Open to U.S. researchers: Scientists from any U.S. institution can apply to use Nexus.

Why Now?

AI is rapidly changing how science is investigated. Researchers use AI to analyze massive datasets, model complex systems, and test ideas faster than ever before. But these tools require powerful computing resources that — until now — have been inaccessible to many institutions.

This is where Nexus comes in. It will make state-of-the-art AI infrastructure available to scientists all across the country, not just those at top tech hubs.

“This supercomputer will help level the playing field,” said Suresh Marru, principal investigator of the Nexus project and director of Georgia Tech’s new Center for AI in Science and Engineering (ARTISAN). “It’s designed to make powerful AI tools easier to use and available to more researchers in more places.”

Srinivas Aluru, Regents’ Professor and senior associate dean in the College of Computing, said, “With Nexus, Georgia Tech joins the league of academic supercomputing centers. This is the culmination of years of planning, including building the state-of-the-art CODA data center and Nexus’ precursor supercomputer project, HIVE."

Like Nexus, HIVE was supported by NSF funding. Both Nexus and HIVE are supported by a partnership between Georgia Tech’s research and information technology units.

A National Collaboration

Georgia Tech is building Nexus in partnership with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which runs several of the country’s top academic supercomputers. The two institutions will link their systems through a new high-speed network, creating a national research infrastructure.

“Nexus is more than a supercomputer — it’s a symbol of what’s possible when leading institutions work together to advance science,” said Charles Isbell, chancellor of the University of Illinois and former dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. “I'm proud that my two academic homes have partnered on this project that will move science, and society, forward.”

What’s Next

Georgia Tech will begin building Nexus this year, with its expected completion in spring 2026. Once Nexus is finished, researchers can apply for access through an NSF review process. Georgia Tech will manage the system, provide support, and reserve up to 10% of its capacity for its own campus research.

“This is a big step for Georgia Tech and for the scientific community,” said Vivek Sarkar, the John P. Imlay Dean of Computing. “Nexus will help researchers make faster progress on today’s toughest problems — and open the door to discoveries we haven’t even imagined yet.”

Subtitle

Summary sentence

Summary

The National Science Foundation has awarded Georgia Tech and its partners $20 million to build a powerful new supercomputer that will use artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific breakthroughs. Called Nexus, the system will be one of the most advanced, AI-focused research tools in the U.S. Nexus will help scientists tackle urgent challenges such as developing new medicines, advancing clean energy, understanding how the brain works, and driving manufacturing innovations.

Dateline

Tue, 07/15/2025 - 12:00

media@gatech.edu

Contact

Siobhan Rodriguez
Senior Media Relations Representative
Institute Communications

Associated importer

Keywords

National Science Foundation

NSF

Georgia Tech

supercomputer

Nexus

artificial intelligence

scientific breakthroughs

hpc

clean energy

brain research

medicine development

manufacturing innovation

AI infrastructure

scientific discovery

persistent scientific services

quantum materials

climate science

health research

aerospace

robotics

flash storage

data transfer

U.S. researchers

AI workflows

ARTISAN

Coda Data Center

HIVE supercomputer

NCSA

University of Illinois

national collaboration

tech partnerships

research support

AI talent

scientific community

research access

AI tools

AI-centered innovation

go-researchnews

go-ai

News room topics

Campus and Community

Science and Technology

Georgia Tech to Build $20M National AI Supercomputer

admin — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 14:11:41 +0000

Georgia Tech to Build $20M National AI Supercomputer admin Tue, 07/15/2025 - 10:11

Nexus Supercomputer — In Simple Terms

Built for the future of science: Nexus is designed to power the most demanding AI research — from curing diseases, to understanding how the brain works, to engineering quantum materials.

Blazing fast: Nexus can crank out over 400 quadrillion operations per second — the equivalent of everyone in the world continuously performing 50 million calculations every second.

Massive brain plus memory: Nexus combines the power of AI and high-performance computing with 330 trillion bytes of memory to handle complex problems and giant datasets.

Storage: Nexus will feature 10 quadrillion bytes of flash storage, equivalent to about 10 billion reams of paper. Stacked, that’s a column reaching 500,000 km high — enough to stretch from Earth to the moon and a third of the way back.

Supercharged connections: Nexus will have lightning-fast connections to move data almost instantaneously, so researchers do not waste time waiting.

Open to U.S. researchers: Scientists from any U.S. institution can apply to use Nexus.

Why Now?

This is where Nexus comes in. It will make state-of-the-art AI infrastructure available to scientists all across the country, not just those at top tech hubs.

Like Nexus, HIVE was supported by NSF funding. Both Nexus and HIVE are supported by a partnership between Georgia Tech’s research and information technology units.

A National Collaboration

What’s Next

Summary sentence

Summary

Dateline

Tue, 07/15/2025 - 12:00

media@gatech.edu

Contact

Siobhan Rodriguez
Senior Media Relations Representative
Institute Communications

Associated importer

Keywords

National Science Foundation

NSF

Georgia Tech

supercomputer

Nexus

artificial intelligence

scientific breakthroughs

hpc

clean energy

brain research

medicine development

manufacturing innovation

AI infrastructure

scientific discovery

persistent scientific services

quantum materials

climate science

health research

aerospace

robotics

flash storage

data transfer

U.S. researchers

AI workflows

ARTISAN

Coda Data Center

HIVE supercomputer

NCSA

University of Illinois

national collaboration

tech partnerships

research support

AI talent

scientific community

research access

AI tools

AI-centered innovation

go-researchnews

go-ai

News room topics

Campus and Community

Science and Technology

Mercury ID

683137

Source updated

Tue, 07/15/2025 - 10:10

IceCube Detects High-Energy Neutrino Emission from Milky Way

admin — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 18:11:31 +0000

IceCube Detects High-Energy Neutrino Emission from Milky Way admin Thu, 06/29/2023 - 14:11

Georgia Institute of Technology Physics Professor and Center for Relativistic Astrophysics member Ignacio Taboada serves as spokesperson for IceCube Collaboration.

Our Milky Way galaxy is an awe-inspiring feature of the night sky, viewable with the naked eye as a horizon-to-horizon hazy band of stars. Now, for the first time, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has produced an image of the Milky Way using neutrinos — tiny, ghostlike astronomical messengers.

In an article to be published June 30, 2023, in the journal Science, the IceCube Collaboration, an international group of over 350 scientists, presents evidence of high-energy neutrino emission from the Milky Way.

The detected high-energy neutrinos hold energies millions to billions of times higher than those produced by the fusion reactions that power stars.

IceCube was built and is operated with National Science Foundation (NSF) funding and additional support from the fourteen countries that host institutional members of the IceCube Collaboration. IceCube Observatory searches for signs of high-energy neutrinos originating from our galaxy and beyond, out to the farthest reaches of the universe.

A cubic-kilometer neutrino detector operating at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station observes these high-energy neutrinos, explains Ignacio Taboada, spokesperson for IceCube and a physics professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. “IceCube is truly unique,” Taboada says. “Built deep in Antarctic ice, its over 5,000 light sensors search for the flashes of blue light — Cherenkov radiation produced by neutrinos in the upper atmosphere, the Milky Way, and deep into the cosmos.”

Searching the southern sky

“What's intriguing is that, unlike the case for light of any wavelength, in neutrinos, the universe outshines the nearby sources in our own galaxy," says Francis Halzen, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and principal investigator of IceCube.

"As is so often the case, significant breakthroughs in science are enabled by advances in technology," says Denise Caldwell, director of NSF's Physics Division. "The capabilities provided by the highly sensitive IceCube detector, coupled with new data analysis tools, have given us an entirely new view of our galaxy — one that had only been hinted at before. As these capabilities continue to be refined, we can look forward to watching this picture emerge with ever-increasing resolution, potentially revealing hidden features of our galaxy never before seen by humanity."

Interactions between cosmic rays — high-energy protons and heavier nuclei, also produced in our galaxy, and galactic gas and dust inevitably produce both gamma rays and neutrinos. Given the observation of gamma rays from the galactic plane, the Milky Way was expected to be a source of high-energy neutrinos.

“A neutrino counterpart has now been measured, thus confirming what we know about our galaxy and cosmic ray sources,” says Steve Sclafani, a physics Ph.D. student at Drexel University, IceCube member, and co-lead analyzer.

The search focused on the southern sky, where the bulk of neutrino emission from the galactic plane is expected near the center of our galaxy. However, until now, the background of muons and neutrinos produced by cosmic-ray interactions with the Earth’s atmosphere posed significant challenges.

To overcome them, IceCube collaborators at Drexel University developed analyses that select for "cascade" events, or neutrino interactions in the ice that result in roughly spherical showers of light. Because the deposited energy from cascade events starts within the instrumented volume, contamination of atmospheric muons and neutrinos is reduced. Ultimately, the higher purity of the cascade events gave a better sensitivity to astrophysical neutrinos from the southern sky.

Machine learning in the Milky Way

However, the final breakthrough came from the implementation of machine learning methods, developed by IceCube collaborators at TU Dortmund University, that improve the identification of cascades produced by neutrinos as well as their direction and energy reconstruction. The observation of neutrinos from the Milky Way is a hallmark of the emerging critical value that machine learning provides in data analysis and event reconstruction in IceCube.

“The improved methods allowed us to retain over an order of magnitude more neutrino events with better angular reconstruction, resulting in an analysis that is three times more sensitive than the previous search,” says IceCube member, TU Dortmund physics Ph.D. student, and co-lead analyzer Mirco Hünnefeld.

The dataset used in the study included 60,000 neutrinos spanning 10 years of IceCube data, 30 times as many events as the selection used in a previous analysis of the galactic plane using cascade events. These neutrinos were compared to previously published prediction maps of locations in the sky where the galaxy was expected to shine in neutrinos.

The maps included one made from extrapolating Fermi Large Area Telescope gamma-ray observations of the Milky Way and two alternative maps identified as KRA-gamma by the group of theorists who produced them.

“This long-awaited detection of cosmic ray-interactions in the galaxy is also a wonderful example of what can be achieved when modern methods of knowledge discovery in machine learning are consistently applied.” says Wolfgang Rhode, professor of physics at TU Dortmund University, IceCube member, and Hünnefeld’s advisor.

The power of machine learning offers great future potential, bringing other observations closer within reach.

“The strong evidence for the Milky Way as a source of high-energy neutrinos has survived rigorous tests by the collaboration,” says Taboada, the IceCube spokesperson. “Now, the next step is to identify specific sources within the galaxy.”

These and other questions will be addressed in planned follow-up analyses by IceCube.

“Observing our own galaxy for the first time using particles instead of light is a huge step,” says Naoko Kurahashi Neilson, professor of physics at Drexel University, IceCube member, and Sclafani’s advisor. “As neutrino astronomy evolves, we will get a new lens with which to observe the universe.”

About IceCube Neutrino Observatory

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is funded and operated primarily through an award from the National Science Foundation to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The IceCube Collaboration, with over 350 scientists in 58 institutions from around the world, runs an extensive scientific program that has established the foundations of neutrino astronomy. IceCube’s research efforts, including critical contributions to the detector operation, are funded by agencies in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including NSF. IceCube construction was also funded with significant contributions from the National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS & FWO) in Belgium; the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) in Germany; the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat, and the Swedish Research Council in Sweden; and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Fund.

About Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its more than 45,000 undergraduate and graduate students, representing 50 states and more than 148 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

Subtitle

Our galaxy is seen through a new lens as NSF IceCube Collaboration presents evidence of high-energy neutrino emission from the Milky Way

Summary sentence

Our galaxy is seen through a new lens as NSF IceCube Collaboration presents evidence of high-energy neutrino emission from the Milky Way

Summary

High-energy neutrinos — with energies millions to billions of times higher than those produced by the fusion reactions that power stars — have been detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a gigaton detector operating at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. It was built and is operated with National Science Foundation (NSF) funding and additional support from the fourteen countries that host institutional members of the IceCube Collaboration.

Dateline

Thu, 06/29/2023 - 12:00

jess@cos.gatech.edu

Contact

Science Contacts:

Francis Halzen, IceCube Principal Investigator
Vilas Research Professor and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor of Physics
Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Ignacio Taboada, IceCube Spokesperson
Professor of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology

Press Contacts:

Georgia Institute of Technology
Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communications, College of Sciences

IceCube Press
press@icecube.wisc.edu

NSF Media Affairs
media@nsf.gov

Keywords

go-researchnews

cos-planetary

IceCube Collaboration

NSF

Ignacio Taboada

IceCube Neutrino Observatory

neutrinos

Milky Way

News room topics

Science and Technology

Mercury ID

668279

Source updated

Thu, 06/29/2023 - 14:08

Georgia Tech to Help Expand Research at Historically Black Colleges  and Universities

bwaye3 — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 14:50:18 +0000

Georgia Tech to Help Expand Research at Historically Black Colleges  and Universities bwaye3 Tue, 07/19/2022 - 10:50

Georgia Tech’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) was recently awarded a $995,550 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to enable network and research enhancements for nearby historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).  

The NSF grant will fund at 100 percent a two-year project titled Promoting Research and Education at Small Colleges in the Atlanta University Center and at Tuskegee University Through Network Architecture Enhancements. Through this project, Georgia Tech, in collaboration with Southern Crossroads (SoX), will extend advanced networking services and cyberinfrastructure access to Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse School of Medicine, Spelman College, and Tuskegee University. The project includes a robust training and support program to ensure proper adoption and success for researchers and educators at participating institutions. The Atlanta University Consortium (AUC) Woodruff Library will benefit from network upgrades through the grant as well.

Cas D’Angelo, OIT associate vice president and chief operating officer, serves as principal investigator for the project. He also serves as president of SoX, a Georgia Tech affiliate organization that serves nonprofit education, research, and government entities with cyberinfrastructure and global high-performance connectivity. 

“We started preparing a compelling proposal package that would demonstrate the need and value to the research community in early 2021,” said D’Angelo. “For years, we have been working to get institutions within the AUC — the oldest and largest contiguous consortium of African American higher education institutions in the U.S. — connected to the SoX regional network, given their proximity. This project provides us with that opportunity.”  

This project will also lay the groundwork for expansion to other HBCUs.

The NSF has solicited proposals to support traditionally underserved institutions of higher education through partnerships with regional entities that have experience in high-performance research and education networking like Georgia Tech. Special emphasis has been placed on HBCUs, tribal colleges and universities, and other traditionally minority-serving institutions.   

To learn more, visit sox.net.

Summary sentence

Georgia Tech’s Office of Information Technology was recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to enable network and research enhancements for nearby historically black colleges and universities.

Summary

Dateline

Wed, 07/13/2022 - 12:00

courtney.hill@gatech.edu

Location

Atlanta, GA

Associated importer

Keywords

Technology

HBCU

minority

AUC

cyberinfrastructure

NSF

grant

diversity

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Science and Technology

NSF

Georgia Tech to Build $20M National AI Supercomputer

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Georgia Tech to Build $20M National AI Supercomputer

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IceCube Detects High-Energy Neutrino Emission from Milky Way

Searching the southern sky

Machine learning in the Milky Way

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Georgia Tech to Help Expand Research at Historically Black Colleges  and Universities

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Georgia Tech to Build $20M National AI Supercomputer

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Georgia Tech to Build $20M National AI Supercomputer

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IceCube Detects High-Energy Neutrino Emission from Milky Way

Searching the southern sky

Machine learning in the Milky Way

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Georgia Tech to Help Expand Research at Historically Black Colleges and Universities

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Georgia Tech to Help Expand Research at Historically Black Colleges  and Universities