MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and LEMONT, Ill., Oct. 17, 2023 — Groq, an artificial intelligence (AI) solutions company, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory announced today that Groq hardware is now available to researchers through the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility’s (ALCF) AI Testbed. The ALCF is a DOE Office of Science user facility that provides high-performance computing (HPC) resources and AI technologies for open science.

The Groq software and hardware ecosystem is designed to accelerate the time to solution for complex AI problems, in particular AI inference, and the GroqRack deployment at Argonne will provide benefits to researchers working on critical scientific challenges such as imaging sciences, fusion energy, material design, and drug discovery. The unique Groq architecture and generalized compiler will deliver improved performance for a wide range of AI models.

“Standing up a GroqRack at Argonne National Laboratory reflects both the hard work of the Groq team and our strong partnership with Argonne, which will provide researchers the flexibility they need to innovate and push the boundaries of what’s possible with the ALCF AI Testbed,” said Jonathan Ross, CEO and founder of Groq.

The Groq system’s inference capabilities will be particularly useful in advancing Argonne’s efforts to develop and support an integrated research infrastructure that seamlessly integrates advanced computing resources with experimental facilities, such as light sources and fusion experiments, to accelerate the pace of discovery.

There will be a Groq AI Workshop that will introduce users to the Groq system deployed at the ALCF AI Testbed. This hands-on training session is targeted to researchers at universities, national labs, and industries working on open science and will help researchers get started on their science campaigns.

“Inference is a critical part of leveraging AI for science as it allows researchers to use trained machine learning models to make predictions or discover patterns in complex data,” said Michael E. Papka, ALCF’s director, and deputy associate laboratory director for Argonne’s Computing, Environment and Life Sciences directorate. “Incorporating Groq inference-based solutions into the ALCF AI Testbed further strengthens our portfolio of AI accelerator offerings to our research community.”

Argonne researchers are using Groq’s AI platform to improve predictive capabilities in real time for fusion energy science, helping to identify a safe operating region for plasma within a tokamak. The team is also exploring how to build workflows for fusion applications to connect traditional HPC to AI accelerators to mitigate large-scale disruptions in burning plasmas in experimental tokamak systems.

In another effort, Argonne and Groq partnered to advance drug discovery for COVID-19 by accelerating the time to results from days to minutes. In creating models of the virus and helping researchers screen them against a database of billions of candidate drug molecules at an accelerated rate, the AI models helped identify high-potential lead compounds to be used in clinical therapy trials. These same techniques are being deployed in drug discovery for cancer.

Aileen Black, President of Groq Government & Sales Public Sector, shared, “We’re thrilled to build upon our successful partnership with Argonne and collaborate with other DOE labs to advance LLM innovation. Our drug discovery work was just the beginning–we’re committed to enabling energy-efficient and scalable AI solutions for a sustainable computing future.”

The ALCF AI Testbed’s GroqRack compute cluster is open globally to researchers in academia, industry or national labs. Anyone interested in using the system can submit project proposals via the ALCF’s Director’s Discretionary Program.

Additionally, Groq, Argonne, and other AI vendors will hold a tutorial at SC23 to introduce researchers to novel AI accelerators for scientific computing. Join us for the tutorial.

About Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by  UChicago Argonne, LLC for the  U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

About Groq

Groq is an AI solutions company and the inventor of the Language Processing Unit accelerator that is purpose-built and software-driven to power Large Language Models (LLMs) for the exploding AI market. For more information, visit www.groq.com.

---

Source: Mariah Larwood And Beth Cerny, Argonne