Carol Song is opening a door for researchers to advance science on Anvil, Purdue University's new AI-ready supercomputer, an opportunity she couldn't have imagined as a teenager in China.
I grew up in a tumultuous time when, unless you had unusual circumstances, the only option for high school grads was to work alongside farmers or factory workers, then suddenly I was told I could go to college, said Song, now the project director of Anvil.
And not just any college. Her scores on a national entrance exam opened the door to Tsinghua University, home to China's most prestigious engineering school.
Along the way, someone told her computers would be big, so she signed up for computer science before she had ever seen a computer. She learned soon enough.
We were building hardware from the ground up, designing microinstructions and logic circuits, so I got to understand computers from the inside out, she said.
Easing Access to Supercomputers Skip forward a few years to grad school at the University of Illinois when another big door opened.
While working in distributed systems, she was hired as one of the first programmers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, one of the first sites in a U.S. program funding supercomputers that researchers shared.
To make the systems more accessible, she helped develop alternatives to the crude editing tools of the day that displayed one line of a program at a time. And she helped pioneering researchers like Michael Norman create visualizations of their work.
GPUs Add AI to HPC In 2005, she joined Purdue, where she has helped manage nearly three dozen research projects representing more than $60 million in grants as a senior research scientist in the university's supercomputing center.
All that helped when we started defining Anvil. I see researchers' pain points when they are getting on a new system, said Song.
Anvil links 1,000 Dell EMC PowerEdge C6525 server nodes with 2,000 of the latest AMD x86 CPUs and 64 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs on a NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand network to handle traditional HPC and new AI workloads.
The system, built by Dell Technologies, will deliver 5.3 petaflops and half a million GPU cycles per year to tens of thousands of researchers across the U.S. working on the National Science Foundation's XSEDE network.
Anvil Forges Desktop, Cloud Links To harness that power, Anvil supports interactive user interfaces as well as the batch jobs that are traditional in high performance computing.
Researchers can use their favorite tools like Jupyter notebooks and remote desktop interfaces so the cluster can look just like in their daily work environment, she said.
Anvil will also support links to Microsoft Azure, so researchers can access its large datasets and commercial cloud-computing muscle. It's an innovative part of this system that will let researchers experiment with creating workflows that span research and commercial environments, Song said.
Fighting COVID, Exploring AI More than 30 research teams have already signed up to be early users of Anvil.
One team will apply deep learning to medical images to improve diagnosis of respiratory diseases including COVID-19. Another will build causal and logical check points into neural networks to explore why deep learning delivers excellent results.
We'll support a lot of GPU-specific tools like NGC containers for accelerated applications, and as with every new system, users can ask for additional toolkits and libraries they want, she said.
The Anvil team aims to invite industry collaborations to test new ideas using up to 10 percent of the system's capacity. It's a discretionary use we want to apply strategically to enable projects that wouldn't happen without such resources, she said.
Opening Doors for Science and Inclusion Early users are working on Anvil today and the system will be available for all users in about a month.
Anvil's opening day has a special significance for Song, one of the few women to act as a lead manager for a national supercomputer site.
Carol Song and Purdue's Anvil supercomputer I've been fortunate to be in environments where I've always been encouraged to do my best and given opportunities, she said.
Around the industry and the research computing community there still aren't a lot of women in leadership roles, so it's an ongoing effort and there's a lot of room to do better, but I'm also very enthusiastic about mentoring women to help them get into this field, she added.
Purdue's research computing group shares Song's enthusiasm about getting women into supercomputing. It's home to one of the first chapters of the international Women in High-Performance Computing organization.
Purdue's Women in HPC chapter sent an all-female team to a student cluster competition at SC18. It also hosts outside speakers, provides travel support to attend conferences and connects students and early career professionals to experienced mentors like Song.
Pictured at top: Carol Song, Anvil's principal investigator (PI) and project director along with Anvil co-PIs (from left) Rajesh Kalyanam, Xiao Zhu and Preston Smith.
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
02/05/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
01/05/2026
January 5 2026, 18:30 (PST) NBCUniversal's Peacock to Be First Streamer to ...
07/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
07/04/2026
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's leading streaming television channels, at NAB 2026 will be launching new Studio services to help content ow...
07/04/2026
Ikegami USA has chosen NAB 2026 in Las Vegas as the launch platform for new additions to its range of broadcast-quality television production equipment. These w...
07/04/2026
April 19, 2026, Las Vegas Kiloview, an innovative provider of AV-over-IP technologies, will showcase its latest broadcast IP solutions at NAB 2026, presenting...
07/04/2026
Bitmovin has announced support for Server-Guided Ad Insertion (SGAI) across its playback products using HLS interstitials, enabling more advanced ad-supported s...
07/04/2026
Synamedia is unveiling AI by Quortex at The NAB show, a just-in-time AI plugin framework that applies intelligence only when needed across video processing, dis...
07/04/2026
Cuez will showcase four additions to its cloud-based newsroom, rundown and automation platform at NAB Show 2026 (April 18 22, Las Vegas, Booth N1867):
Cuez ...
07/04/2026
CueScript to Showcase Innovations at NAB that Add Mobility Options, Ease Editing...
07/04/2026
Barix Extends Transport Options for Multi-Engine IP Encoder
Brie Clayton April 7, 2026
0 Comments
New for NAB, Barix adds SRT and RIST support to Mult...
07/04/2026
Elite Media Technologies Selects Interra Systems' BATON File-Based QC Soluti...
07/04/2026
Tightrope Media Systems to Debut Cablecast LiveBridge for Simultaneous Streaming...
07/04/2026
Cuez Brings Four New Innovations to NAB 2026: From Story-Centric Newsroom to Ope...
07/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
07/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
07/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
07/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
07/04/2026
Designed for synchronized multi-stream playback, low-latency delivery, and real-time analytics, MATCH introduces a unified viewing experience for sports broadca...
07/04/2026
Berklee Students to Honor George Martin with Performance of Original Scores The orchestra, led by associate professor Xander Rovang, will perform several work...
06/04/2026
Michigan legends bring a new voice to the broadcast as TNT Sports and CBS Sports...
06/04/2026
From high school sports all the way up to the major leagues, building high-quali...
06/04/2026
Quickplay, an AI company for the media and entertainment industry, has been accepted into the Advanced tier of the TwelveLabs Ecosystem Partner Program. Quickpl...
06/04/2026
Grass Valley has announced the Future Playmakers Program, a global initiative to...
06/04/2026
El l der de operaciones impulsa la producci n en estudio mientras encuentra insp...
06/04/2026
The ops leader helps lead the charge in studio for the Spanish-language broadcas...
06/04/2026
Behind The Mic provides a roundup of recent news regarding on-air talent, includ...
06/04/2026
The National Hockey League (NHL), in partnership with Verizon and the New Jersey Devils, today announced the opening of the NHL Innovation Lab powered by Verizo...
06/04/2026
Rock League, a new professional curling league, has announced that ESPN+ will stream its inaugural 2026 season for fans in the United States. The first Rock Lea...
06/04/2026
Advanced Systems Group has announced the appointment of Andrea (Andy) Cummis as Vice President of Systems Design and Engineering. In this role, she will lead de...
06/04/2026
Backed by Bolt Ventures, the venture brings Bryson DeChambeau, Grant Horvat, and...
06/04/2026
With this environment we can start that collaboration even earlier because we ca...
06/04/2026
Like the immortal lives of vampires, some stories never really end. That's t...
06/04/2026
As podcasting continues to evolve, growth increasingly means building beyond aud...
06/04/2026
Multiband dynamics plug-in enhanced
California-based developer FSK Audio have released a significant update for their innovative multiband dynamics processo...
06/04/2026
Share official & user-created full-rig presets
IK Multimedia's latest TONEX update makes it possible for users of the popular amp and effects modelling ...
06/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/04/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
06/04/2026
Dalet Showcases Dalia Agentic AI and End-to-End Media Workflows at NAB Show 2026
Brie Clayton April 6, 2026
0 Comments
Dalet, a leading technology and...
06/04/2026
OpenDrives Shows Off Sports Expertise in Sports Business Hub located in NAB Show...
06/04/2026
Proton to Demonstrate 3D Application at NAB 2026
Brie Clayton April 6, 2026
0 Comments
Yet further creative potential unleashed through innovation in ...
06/04/2026
Autoscript Highlights Voice-Driven Prompting and PTZ Solutions at NAB 2026
Brie Clayton April 6, 2026
0 Comments
Experience Autoscript Voice, PTZ prom...
06/04/2026
Mediaproxy Highlights Significant Enhancements to its LogServer suite at NAB Sho...
06/04/2026
Wayne, N.J., April 6th, 2026 Phantom High-Speed announces the release of PCC 4...
06/04/2026
April 6th, 2026
TRIBECA STUDIOS AND LILLY ANNOUNCE WINNERS OF INAUGURAL VITAL...
06/04/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Expands Kids Entertainment Lineup With Playground App ...
05/04/2026
Tackles all reported bugs!
SoundBridge have just announced the launch of a new update that introduces a couple of minor changes to their remote collaboratio...
Carol Song is opening a door for researchers to advance science on Anvil, Purdue University's new AI-ready supercomputer, an opportunity she couldn't have imagined as a teenager in China.
