The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $13.77 million for a new next-generation computing platform based on AmpereOne® M and designed to remove barriers to AI and research computing for scientists and students nationwide. The grant was secured by Stony Brook University’s Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS) in New York.

The project, a collaboration between Stony Brook, the University at Buffalo and Ampere®, will deliver a high-performance, large-memory system built for energy efficiency, scalability, and ease of use—a combination often missing in traditional high-performance computing resources.

Closing the Gap in Research Computing Access

While AI and advanced computing have transformed many scientific disciplines, access to the infrastructure needed to run these workloads has not been evenly distributed. Many communities, research areas and educational institutions remain underserved, with limited ability to run high-throughput workloads at scale.

This initiative aims to change that. The new platform will be open to researchers and educators across the country, removing the need for deep hardware expertise and ensuring consistent, competitive performance across a broad range of workloads—from AI inference to genomics to computational linguistics and more.

“This project employs a comprehensive, multilayered strategy, with regional and national elements to ensure the widest possible benefits,” said IACS director Robert J. Harrison. “The team will collaborate with multiple initiatives and projects, to reach a broad audience that spans all experience levels from high school students beginning to explore science and technology to faculty members advancing innovation through scholarship and teaching.”

Why AmpereOne® M

At the heart of the new system are AmpereOne® M processors, engineered for exceptional AI inference performance while maintaining energy efficiency. These processors excel not only in AI and machine learning workloads, but also in the scalar and imperfectly vectorized tasks common in research computing.

The system will offer large memory capacity and scalable AI performance, enabling tens of thousands of simultaneous jobs or users and advancing the mission of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) to make AI accessible to all.

“AmpereOne® M delivers the performance, memory and energy efficiency required for modern research workloads—helping democratize access to AI and data-driven science by lowering the barriers to large-scale compute,” said Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer at Ampere. “We look forward to working with Stony Brook University to integrate this platform into research and education programs, accelerating discoveries in genomics, bioinformatics and AI.”

Impact Across Disciplines and Communities

The platform will target research areas often overlooked by existing national computing resources, such as life sciences, genomics and computational linguistics. It will also serve as a hands-on training ground for the next generation of scientists—from high school students exploring STEM to faculty driving cutting-edge research.

By making optimized software tools for Ampere hardware readily available, the initiative enables domain experts to achieve top-tier performance without rewriting their codebases from scratch.

Efficient, Scalable and Ready for the Future

With high performance, lower energy use and nationwide reach, this project represents a new model for research computing that prioritizes accessibility, efficiency and scalability. Over the next five years, it will bring advanced computing capabilities to thousands of users, fostering collaboration across institutions to accelerate discoveries in AI, life sciences and beyond.