AI Foundation Models for Science
The NASA Office of the Chief Science Data Officer, in collaboration with the five science divisions, is developing a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) foundation models tailored to the needs of NASA science. An AI foundation model is a large machine learning model pretrained on vast datasets using self-supervision, enabling it to perform a wide range of tasks with minimal additional training. This initiative is highly relevant for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD), as it maximizes the potential of NASA’s archive of science datasets, reduces the effort required to build AI applications, simplifies usage of scientific data, accelerates discovery, improves data-driven decision-making, and helps uncover new insights across datasets.
Building AI foundation models requires substantial amounts of computational resources with the latest GPUs. GPUs from NASA High-End Computing services and consulting expertise were crucial to pretrain the 2.3 billion-parameter Prithvi WxC foundation model.
Rahul Ramachandran,
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center
Quick Facts
- Researchers used extensive GPU resources at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility to pretrain the AI foundation model for Weather and Climate (Prithvi WxC). The pretraining process used 16 nodes (totaling 64 A100 GPUs) and ran for approximately 15 days.
- Prithvi WxC uses NASA MERRA-2 reanalysis datasets generated at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation and has three distinct downstream applications: hurricane track forecasting, downscaling of weather prediction and climate projection, and a gravity waves parameterization.
- NASA expects that the science community will build additional downstream applications using the Prithvi WxC foundation model.
- The goals are to continue to improve the model and build additional foundation models for other disciplines such as heliophysics.
Researchers
- Rahul Ramachandran, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Please enable Javascript to see email address.
- Manil Maskey, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Please enable Javascript to see email address.