GCP – Google Public Sector supports AI-optimized HPC infrastructure for researchers at Caltech

For decades, institutions like Caltech, have been at the forefront of large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) research. As high-performance computing (HPC) clusters continue to evolve, researchers across disciplines have been increasingly equipped to process massive datasets, run complex simulations, and train generative models with billions of parameters. With this powerful combination, researchers have accelerated scientific discovery across diverse use cases including genomic analysis, drug discovery, weather forecasting, and beyond.

Modern research workloads, driven by AI and HPC, demand processing of structured and unstructured data at an unprecedented scale, while maintaining sub-millisecond storage latency, enterprise-level security and compliance, and reproducibility despite varying hardware and software configurations. This presents significant technical challenges for both researchers and supporting departments.

To accelerate scientific discovery in the AI era, Google Public Sector has announced it will support AI-optimized HPC infrastructure for researchers at Caltech. This new initiative furthers Caltech’s mission to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education.

This support provides Caltech researchers four key resources:

• A workhorse of diverse processor types, including Cloud GPUs and Google’s custom-design Arm-based processors (Axion) and Cloud Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for AI acceleration and intense workloads.
• Access to Google’s first party datasets like AlphaFold, Earth Engine, Google Maps Platform and VirusTotal to accelerate discoveries across all disciplines.
• A fully-managed, unified AI development platform, Vertex AI Platform, which includes Vertex AI Agent Builder and 200+ first-party (Gemini, Imagen 3), third-party, and open (Gemma) foundation models in Model Garden.
• Dedicated campus training and workshops for students, researchers, and supporting teams, enabling them to increase AI literacy and adoption.

Google Public Sector and Caltech will integrate this AI-optimized infrastructure with Caltech’s existing HPC research environments to provide researchers instant access while maintaining their existing data and workloads.

One of the first initiatives that will be powered by this new AI infrastructure will be led by Dr. Babak Hassibi, Mose and Lillian S. Bohn Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech. Dr. Hassibi’s research focuses on making AI models more efficient, which is crucial for the advancement of the field. Current large language models (LLMs) can have billions or trillions of parameters. In efforts to make models even more efficient and useful. Dr. Hassibi’s proposal uses Vertex AI and has the potential to make AI more accessible and sustainable.

“We will be using Vertex AI to develop training methods on TPUs that incorporate pruning, quantization, and distillation, as well as considerations regarding resilience to attacks, into the training process itself. The former has the potential to significantly reduce inference time costs of the trained models, making AI much more accessible and sustainable. The latter can markedly improve the safety of systems that employ AI. Both will allow AI to move to the edge. In addition to the practical benefits, the work will inform the theoretical studies of AI models, in particular, their generalization performance and the limits of their compressibility, which is a major focus of my research group,” said Dr. Babak Hassibi.

By providing access to advanced AI and planet-scale infrastructure, this support enables Caltech researchers to continue to push scientific boundaries, investigate complex problems, and develop innovative solutions.

“We are living a time when we need to answer bigger questions faster, and do more with less. Google Public Sector is excited to support Caltech to build an AI-optimized infrastructure that will lead scientific discoveries across all domains for the best of all our constituents,” said Reymund Dumlao, Director of State & Local Government and Education at Google Public Sector.

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For more information about Caltech’s research heritage and centers, visit https://www.caltech.edu/research