The University of Pennsylvania joined the AI arms race with Betty, a new supercomputer located in Collegeville, about 30 miles from its main campus, writes Joseph N. DiStefano for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Betty, a glass-walled stack of central and graphics processing units with data storage, will run AI models that generate findings after searching and analyzing videos, images, texts, and databanks. These models, guided by researchers’ increasingly specialized instructions, improve with each query.
UPenn named Betty, which requires the same amount of electricity as a village of 1,000 homes, after pioneering Penn computer scientist Frances “Betty” Holberton. It is a tenant of Flexential data center and is run by Penn Advanced Research Computing Center.
Penn believes it will secure a place on the Top500.org list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
After two years of meetings between deans and researchers from Penn’s 12 colleges, it took less than a year to approve and build Betty – a record for Penn decision-making, according to Michael Borda, Penn’s associate vice provost for research.
“No question, there’s an arms race in computing,” he said. “We were not offering enough capacity.”
Read more about Betty, the Collegeville supercomputer, in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
