This project, called the Cognitive Hardware And Software Ecosystem Community Infrastructure (CHASE-CI), will build a cloud of hundreds of affordable Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), networked together with a variety of neural network machines to facilitate development of next generation cognitive computing. This cloud will be accessible by 30 researchers assembled from 10 universities via the NSF-funded Pacific Research Platform. These researchers will investigate a range of problems from image and video recognition, computer vision, contextual robotics to cognitive neurosciences using the cloud to be purpose-built in this project.
Training of neural network with large data-sets is best performed on GPUs. Lack of availability of affordable GPUs and lack of easy access to the new generation of Non-von Neumann (NvN) machines with embedded neural networks impede research in cognitive computing. The purpose-built cloud will be available over the network to address this bottleneck. PIs will study various Deep Neural Network, Recurrent Neural Network, and Reinforcement Learning Algorithms on this platform.
