The Department of Energy took a major step in establishing artificial intelligence as a priority in the coming decades.

Specifically, DOE announced a $67 million investment in a number of AI projects from institutions in both government and academia as part of its AI for Science initiative, with the Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory among those leading the way. The goal of this funding is to establish foundational models in research areas such as scientific machine learning, large language models for high-performance computing and automating laboratory workflow.

In total, six ORNL-led (or co-led) projects received funding, including:

• Durban: Enhancing Performance Portability in HPC (high-performance computing) Software with Artificial Intelligence (Lead PI: Keita Teranishi)
• ENGAGE: (E)nergy-efficient (N)ovel Al(g)orithms and (A)rchitectures for (G)raph L(e)arning (Lead PI: Thomas Potok)
• DyGenAI: Dynamic Generative Artificial Intelligence for Prediction and Control of High-Dimensional Nonlinear Complex Systems (Lead PI: Guannan Zhang)
• SciGPT: Scalable Foundational Model for Scientific Machine Learning (ORNL Lead: Prasanna Balaprakash)
• Productive AI-Assisted HPC Software Ecosystem (ORNL Lead: William F. Godoy)
• Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning for Science: Building Sustainable and Trustworthy Foundation Models (ORNL Lead: Olivera Kotevska, Ph.D.)

The projects were chosen via competitive peer review under the DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement, or FOA, for Advancements in Artificial Intelligence for Science. Funding for these projects from DOE lasts up to three years.

“This announcement is very important for the lab because we’ve been hearing about the progress of AI for many years now,” said William Godoy, senior computer scientist at ORNL. “But we were still working on what AI means for HPC, considering the niche nature of HPC systems.”

For Godoy and his team, that means more research into how to best use LLMs on systems like Frontier, the first supercomputer to reach the exascale barrier. Godoy said that shortly after the release of ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot, many of his colleagues in the national laboratory community started examining how LLMs could be created in conjunction with DOE’s mission. 

Godoy will use the new funding for his project to work alongside his contemporaries at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, along with HPC and AI experts from the University of Maryland and Northeastern University, to identify the best strategies for