Lessons from Benchmarking the AI Tennessee Initiative Resources

Artificial intelligence computational capabilities are emerging as an important capability for research across many disciplines and having access to these capabilities is also a key component in research training for developing the future, skilled AI workforce. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville started the AI Tennessee Initiative in September 2022 specifically to support AI related research and research training. The UTK AI Tennessee Initiative provided funds to purchase seven Dell PowerEdge XE8640 high performance computing servers to support the Initiative. The XE8640 server was new from Dell for 2023 and is an air cooled HPC class system capable of supporting up to four high end GPUs. The servers were placed into UTK’s ISAAC Next Generation campus cluster. This paper describes the ISAAC NG cluster and infrastructure, acquisition and installation of the XE8640 hardware, benchmarking, power consumption, and analysis of the benchmark results, as well as lessons learned that may be applicable to other systems.