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University of South Carolina

The University of South Carolina (USC) was established in 1801 and is a full-service, state-supported research university that includes the 358-acre Columbia campus and seven regional campuses with a total full-time student body population of more than 46,000 and 2,100 full-time faculty members. Located in the capital city of Columbia in the geographic center of the state, USC's main campus is part of a thriving metropolitan community of more than 450,000 inhabitants. USC offers a broad spectrum of educational opportunities with 14 colleges and schools that encompass 324 undergraduate and graduate degree-granting programs. USC confers 40% of all bachelor’s, professional, and graduate degrees awarded in public institutions in South Carolina.

Artificial Intelligence Institute

The university-wide AI Institute is a major new initiative of the university. Prof. Amit Sheth assumed its leadership as the founding director in July 2019. His initial team in Fall 1999 included six Ph.D. students and postdocs who have moved with him from the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing at Wright State University, which he directed until June 2019. The institute has embarked on hiring 5 new core AI and 5 new interdisciplinary faculty at all ranks and is complemented by existing faculty collaborators in Computer Science & Engineering department as well as other collaborating centers and faculty members engaged in interdisciplinary research. With the successful hiring of new faculty and graduate students, the AI Institute will have grown to around 25 persons by Fall 2020. The Institute facilities are being built in a staged manner in a 20,000 sqft allocated space; 10,000 sqft is complete.

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AI nameplate
Common Area
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Hallway
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Meeting Room
Office
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Common Area 4

For computational infrastructure, the institute has a dedicated Nvidia A100 GPU cluster, and access to extensive computing resources managed by the Division of Information Technology in collaboration with the Office of Research, Research Computing program which has:

  •  Multiple GPU clusters for deep learning and GPU intensive computations: (a) Two L40S nodes each containing 2x Intel Xeon Platinum 8358 32C 250W 2.6GHz Processor (64 cores), 256 GB RAM, 2X L40S 48GB (b) 8 A100 NVidia “Multi-Instance GPU” (usable as 56 GPUs) with 1TB of RAM; Performance: 5 petaFLOPS AI, 10 petaOPS INT8 (c) Nvidia V100 GPU with 32GB memory and 6,000 GPU cores for compute-intense calculations and three M-6000 GPUs each with 24 GB memory and 3,072 GPU cores for computational research 
  •  High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster, Hyperion, which includes 6,760 compute cores that include powerful Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) and Big Data nodes connected by a very high- speed 100 Gigabit/second network 
  •  The OpenPOWER server powered by an IBM Power-8 CPU supporting up to 160 concurrent threads. Additionally, high-end GPUs communicate with the CPU over high-speed NV-LINK connections that significantly increases throughput for GPU-intensive application

While a university-wide institute with its own core staff, the AI Institute receives additional administrative support to the College of Engineering and Computing.

Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing

The first Engineering classes were taught at the University of South Carolina in 1848. Engineering degrees have been offered at the University of South Carolina since 1894. The Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing was established in 1909 and has an enrollment of more than 3300 students, including 423 full-time graduate students and 2545 full-time undergraduates. The College currently employs 124 tenure, research and clinical track faculty members. Based at USC’s main campus in Columbia, the college is ranked by both U.S. News and World Report and the National Research Council. The Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing's mission is to become a leader in technology innovation, engineering and computing education, and entrepreneurship.

Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing Research Capacity

AI Institute’s research is supported by the Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing staff, including the Pre-Award and Post-Award staff. In the fiscal year 2015, Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing principal investigators were awarded $30 million in extramural funding. The Swearingen Engineering Center has been the home of the Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing since 1987. With more than 500,000 square feet of teaching, research, and laboratory space, the Swearingen Engineering Center is one of the largest engineering facilities in the Southeast. Research at the Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing is supplemented and supported through our centers, institutes, and research groups, which include several South Carolina SmartState Centers of Economic Excellence. These research centers coordinate and promote faculty and student research extending across and beyond the school.

Around AIISC Building

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AIISC Space

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