ECE Assistant Professor Zhao Zhang has received an award from NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC). The project is “Diamond: Democratizing Large Neural Network Model Training for Science”. The total value is $2,999,520, of which $949,528 is the Rutgers portion for a three-year period starting Fall 2023. Rutgers University is the lead institute.
The Diamond project is led by Zhao Zhang at Rutgers University with collaboration of University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Diamond is a service designed to democratize access to cutting-edge DL methods by abstracting the use of HPC resources. Diamond combines novel computer science research with translational computer science to reduce the significant barriers that impede adoption of DL methods in science. With Diamond, domain scientists can focus on the neural network architecture design to solve their domain-specific challenges without worrying about Cyberinfrastructure management. It provides a web service-enabled programming interface supporting the DL lifecycle from development to deployment and dissemination. It offers container configuration, automatic scaling for distributed training, hyper-parameter tuning, and model sharing. It also applies crucial performance optimizations, including planning for long training jobs, performance-aware model placement, cross-cluster training, and data management.
Congratulations to Zhao!