An engineer works on the Falcon installation in summer 2024. Photo by Kit Hayes for Virginia Tech.

A lot can change in four years.

In January 2021, Advanced Research Computing, a unit within the Division of Information Technology , introduced Infer, its first graphical processing unit (GPU) cluster capable of handling significant artificial intelligence (AI) inference tasks.

Through AI inference, scientists use a machine learning model, which has been trained on existing data, to infer something about a new data set. This method can be used to make predictions about upcoming events or even to interpret previously incomprehensible things such as what a cow is "saying" when it moos.

Those abilities were remarkable then, but over the past four years, research leveraging AI — not to mention enormous data sets such as large language models — has rapidly expanded at Virginia Tech, calling for far more GPU power than Infer offers.

Virginia Tech’s newest GPU cluster, which came online in December and is now available for use by faculty and students through Advanced Research Computing .

Falcon is composed of 52 nodes, each with four GPUs, for a total of 208 GPUs. To maximize flexibility in the types of research that can be conducted using Falcon , there are two types of GPUs within the cluster.

Following its installation this past summer, Advanced Research Computing worked with some research teams who served as early testers of Falcon. Several of these researchers are graduate students in computer science who are part of the Virginia Tech Learning on Graphs Lab (VLOG), which is directed by Dawei Zhou, assistant professor of computer science. Zhou is also core faculty at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics.

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