National Research Platform
A Testbed for Scientific Research
The National Research Platform (NRP) is a partnership of more than 50 institutions, led by researchers at UC San Diego, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center. It includes resources funded by federal agencies (National Science Foundation, Department of Defense and others) research and education networks (CENIC, Internet2 and others), and dozens of colleges and universities in the U.S. and around the world. The innovative, all-in-one system is designed as a testbed for science drivers to expedite science and enable transformative discoveries, as well as advance the state of the art of higher education.
NRP has an ambitious vision to create an Open National Cyberinfrastructure (CI) that allows the federation of CI at nearly all 4,000 accredited, degree-granting higher education institutions, non-profit research institutions and national laboratories in the USA.
NRP is working toward that vision by offering a flexible architecture and software stack to build on horizontally and vertically. Horizontally to allow hundreds to thousands of institutions to join their resources with NRP and vertically such that other CI teams may design, build and operate services with novel functionality on top of the NRP platform.
NRP’s key goals include:
- Transforming education by introducing data and computing into the classroom with special focus on AI
- Accelerating research through accelerated computing, AI and big data
- Accelerating research via domain-specific architectures to address scaling beyond Moore’s Law
To pursue these goals, we provide a “playground of hardware architectures” for computer science systems research on the same “production” platform used to accelerate the research of domain scientists, and enable AI education across many domains.
