The United States Is Establishing a National Center for Access to AI Resources for Science
The United States Is Establishing a National Center for Access to AI Resources for Science
On September 1, the University of California San Diego announced that the U.S. National Science Foundation had awarded $35 million over five years to establish the NAIRR Operations Center. The center will connect researchers, educators, and students with computing resources, data, AI models, software, and technical support. According to the NSF award record, the agreement will begin on October 1 and end on September 30, 2031.
During its first two and a half years, the NAIRR pilot, an NSF program that connects research and education teams with AI resources, supported about 900 teams and educators across all 50 states. The San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego will lead NAIRR-OC in partnership with the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
Private, federal, and academic organizations provide the computing resources, data, models, and software used in research. NAIRR-OC will coordinate these providers and bring their resources together through a single national online service. A team will be able to request the resources it needs in one place and then receive documentation, training, and technical support. A forum and feedback channels will allow the center to adjust its services in response to users’ needs.
The center will build on the national services that these two computing centers already operate. Suitable functions from the pilot will become part of the long-term infrastructure, together with procedures for accessing resources and receiving user support.
The university identifies biomedicine and public health as fields where combining computing resources, data, and AI tools can support reproducible, collaborative science. The grant is intended to fund routine operations: matching a research team’s request with distributed resources and helping the team use those resources in its project.