The White House announced this week that the Institute for Protein Design will be among the first organizations awarded access to the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR). This program aims to democratize advanced AI research by providing academics with large-scale computing resources.
NAIRR was created as part of President Joe Biden’s October 2023 executive order on AI. He directed the the National Science Foundation (NSF) to lead the program which draws resources, at least initially, from supercomputing facilities supported by NSF and the Department of Energy. Our pilot project, Advanced Training for Protein Diffusion, Binder Prediction, and Antibody Design, will be supported until October 2024 by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

With NAIRR support, our scientists are poised to make even greater strides at the intersection of AI and protein science. We intend to continue our traditions of responsible and open science, having hosted the world’s first AI safety summit in our field and having released our most powerful AI systems for protein modeling and design as free and open tools that all scientists may use.