DeepSpeed4Science Initiative: Enabling Large-Scale Scientific Discovery through Sophisticated AI System Technologies

In the upcoming decade, deep learning may revolutionize the natural sciences, enhancing our capacity to model and predict natural occurrences. This could herald a new era of scientific exploration, bringing significant advancements across sectors from drug development to renewable energy. To answer this call, we present DeepSpeed4Science initiative (deepspeed4science.ai) which aims to build unique capabilities through AI system technology innovations to help domain experts to unlock today's biggest science mysteries. By leveraging DeepSpeed's current technology pillars (training, inference and compression) as base technology enablers, DeepSpeed4Science will create a new set of AI system technologies tailored for accelerating scientific discoveries by addressing their unique complexity beyond the common technical approaches used for accelerating generic large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we showcase the early progress we made with DeepSpeed4Science in addressing two of the critical system challenges in structural biology research.

Linking the Dynamic PicoProbe Analytical Electron-Optical Beam Line / Microscope to Supercomputers

The Dynamic PicoProbe at Argonne National Laboratory is undergoing upgrades that will enable it to produce up to 100s of GB of data per day. While this data is highly important for both fundamental science and industrial applications, there is currently limited on-site infrastructure to handle these high-volume data streams. We address this problem by providing a software architecture capable of supporting large-scale data transfers to the neighboring supercomputers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. To prepare for future scientific workflows, we implement two instructive use cases for hyperspectral and spatiotemporal datasets, which include: (i) off-site data transfer, (ii) machine learning/artificial intelligence and traditional data analysis approaches, and (iii) automatic metadata extraction and cataloging of experimental results. This infrastructure supports expected workloads and also provides domain scientists the ability to reinterrogate data from past experiments to yield additional scientific value and derive new insights.

Achieving 100X faster simulations of complex biological phenomena by coupling ML to HPC ensembles

The use of ML methods to dynamically steer ensemble-based simulations promises significant improvements in the performance of scientific applications. We present DeepDriveMD, a tool for a range of prototypical ML-driven HPC simulation scenarios, and use it to quantify improvements in the scientific performance of ML-driven ensemble-based applications. We discuss its design and characterize its performance. Motivated by the potential for further scientific improvements and applicability to more sophisticated physical systems, we extend the design of DeepDriveMD to support stream-based communication between simulations and learning methods. It demonstrates a 100x speedup to fold proteins, and performs 1.6x more simulations per unit time, improving resource utilization compared to the sequential framework. Experiments are performed on leadership-class platforms, at scales of up to O(1000) nodes, and for production workloads. We establish DeepDriveMD as a high-performance framework for ML-driven HPC simulation scenarios, that supports diverse simulation and ML back-ends, and which enables new scientific insights by improving length- and time-scale accessed.