Students and faculty will soon be able to train artificial intelligence models through a partnership with a California tech giant. There will soon be a facility on campus able to complete projects that once took months in days, according to a College of Engineering announcement.
Cal Poly is opening a $3 million AI Factory on campus that uses four supercomputing systems from NVIDIA, a California hardware company. Students and staff will have access to advanced computing resources found on only a few campuses nationwide, without the usual cost barriers.
“[The AI Factory] is going to be really transformational and unlike anything else in the [Cal State system],” Noyce School director Chris Lupo said at Cal Poly’s AI Convening. “This will place Cal Poly in a leadership position and think beyond tools like Chat GPT.”
The funding for the facility comes from Cal Poly’s Noyce School of Applied Computing, an interdisciplinary school that houses electrical engineering, computer science and software engineering. The investment covers installation, configuration, hardware, software licensing, enterprise support, training and technical consulting, according to university spokesperson Keegan Koberl.
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Cal Poly will now be able to control, figure and own AI models using data generated on campus, like agriculture or business data, according to Lupo. He hopes this facility will be a hub and used by people from all parts of campus.
“There are Noyce faculty that will be able to help utilization,” Lupo said. “There are existing workloads from faculty across the university already that are ready to go on a system like this.”
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The technology could support projects in fields such as agriculture, energy, transportation, environmental monitoring and image processing, according to the announcement.
The facility is expected to be fully operational in January and will be located in building 14. All students, staff and faculty will have access to the facility after a free required training course from the university, according to Koberl.
“The AI Factory exemplifies Cal Poly’s Learn by Doing philosophy, enabling our students and faculty to move beyond using AI to shaping it,” Al Liddicoat, Cal Poly’s provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, said in the announcement. “We are preparing students to lead in an AI driven world and to develop solutions that strengthen our communities.”
Campus Information Technology consolidated several of Cal Poly’s business and enterprise workloads, which allows sufficient energy capacity in the data center, according to Koberl. He says Cal Poly carefully considered the environmental impact of the deployment of the facility and will use an air cooling system.
“Having this computational infrastructure on campus allows us to monitor utilization of resources,” Koberl said. “Cal Poly already has significant renewable energy production with our own solar array and continues to evaluate other forms of renewable energy to support our academic needs.”