Oak Ridge National Laboratory Selects SambaNova to Expand Its Research in Secure and Energy-Efficient AI

SambaNova’s fast inference and energy-efficient platform will assist ORNL’s AI for Science capabilities in tackling challenges of national importance

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Selects SambaNova to Expand Its Research in Secure and Energy-Efficient AI

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Virginia Jamieson
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Nova, the generative AI company offering the most efficient AI chips and fastest models, announces that the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), known for running the world’s most powerful supercomputers, has deployed SambaNova Suite to assist its research with secure and energy-efficient AI. ORNL is well-known for tackling challenges of national importance at-scale and will become the latest U.S. national laboratory to deploy SambaNova’s AI platform.

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SambaNova’s fast inference and energy-efficient platform will assist ORNL’s AI for Science capabilities in tackling challenges of national importance (Graphic: Business Wire)

ORNL is deploying SambaNova Suite, a cutting-edge AI platform, powered by SambaNova’s DataScale^® SN40L systems and Composition of Experts (CoE) AI model framework.

“There is no doubt that the latest evolution of AI is probably the most disruptive change I’ve seen in the scientific discovery process. With generative AI, we’re seeing a tremendous potential to have a true AI assistant for end-to-end science,” said Gina Tourassi, Associate Lab Director for Computing and Computational Sciences at ORNL.

“Our research is focused on secure, trustworthy, and energy-efficient AI. We plan to leverage SambaNova’s architecture to enhance the capabilities in our AI for science, security, and operations portfolio,” said Prasanna Balaprakash, Director of AI Programs at ORNL. “SambaNova’s platform will enable multiple models to be run and queried in parallel for inference time scaling so that answers can be combined to make better predictions. It’s a capability suited for the kind of problems we work on across multiple domains.”

With the Frontier supercomputer, ORNL uses its vast computing resources to conduct research that impacts the world in several areas, including materials science, climate modeling, and nuclear fusion and fission. “SambaNova’s platform will be used for parallel inferencing across models trained on various types of scientific data. Its fast inference capabilities can be scaled up to run reasoning/inferencing tasks while using less energy than would be required on Frontier,” Prasanna Balaprakash, Director of AI Programs at ORNL, said. “It’s much more efficient to do the inference on a platform that is customized for faster inference, and if we can do this with a fraction of the energy costs, it’s a big win.”

“SambaNova’s capabilities map well with our mission, and we are and looking forward to putting it in the hands of our users to help accelerate their scientific campaigns,” aid Arjun Shankar, Division Director for ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences.

“SambaNova is delivering the highest efficiency for inferencing open-source frontier models at levels of accuracy that are unattainable elsewhere. With our technology deployed, Oak Ridge National Laboratory will be able to advance the nation’s competitiveness and AI leadership,” said Marshall Choy, SVP of Product at SambaNova Systems. ”We’re pleased to be announcing an installation at the lab to accelerate US efforts in AI for Science.”

The first step with SambaNova’s platform will involve evaluating various models to see how they behave under different conditions and to measure their trustworthiness. Eventually, ORNL scientists will be able to query many different models across multiple domains of science for correlation, a powerful catalyst for the work ORNL does. For example, models trained on scientific texts may be queried alongside models trained on images to produce aggregated predictions that would not otherwise be possible.

Learn more about SambaNova Suite.

About ORNL

ORNL’s diverse expertise enables the translation of scientific discoveries into new technologies that address national priorities.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the U.S., is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit https://energy.gov/science/.

About SambaNova Systems

Customers turn to SambaNova to quickly deploy state-of-the-art generative AI capabilities within the enterprise. Our purpose-built enterprise-scale AI platform is the technology backbone for the next generation of AI computing.

Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, SambaNova Systems was founded in 2017 by industry luminaries, and hardware and software design experts from Sun/Oracle and Stanford University. Investors include SoftBank Vision Fund 2, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Intel Capital, GV, Walden International, Temasek, GIC, Redline Capital, Atlantic Bridge Ventures, Celesta, and several others. Visit us at sambanova.ai or contact us at info@sambanova.ai. Follow SambaNova Systems on Linkedin and on X.