The Naval Postgraduate School has commissioned an NVIDIA DGX GB300 supercomputer to expand artificial intelligence research, education and mission-focused technology development at the U.S. military’s graduate university in Monterey, California.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang visited the campus to bring the system fully online during the school’s three-day Converge @ NPS event.
The DGX GB300, operating with NVIDIA Mission Control software, gives more than 1,500 resident students and 600 faculty members on-campus access to large-scale AI computing resources.
The platform can support the training of large foundation models, AI inference and high-fidelity simulations. Naval Postgraduate School researchers plan to apply the system to areas including weather forecasting, cybersecurity, ocean modeling, disaster resilience and emergency response planning.
The installation expands an existing collaboration between NVIDIA and the Naval Postgraduate School focused on developing AI technologies for education and practical military and scientific applications.
The system will anchor an NVIDIA AI Technology Center on the Monterey campus. The center serves as a dedicated hub for graduate instruction, applied research and the development of AI tools that can be tested against operational challenges.
Naval Postgraduate School educates active-duty military officers and international partners across disciplines including space operations, ocean science, engineering and national security. Its programs combine graduate education with applied research intended to address real-world defense and public-sector problems.
The DGX GB300 enables students and researchers to build and evaluate AI systems without relying entirely on external cloud infrastructure. On-premises computing can also provide institutions with greater control over data access, security, model development and experimental workloads.
Researchers will be able to train models internally, conduct complex simulations at scale and develop AI applications designed for immediate use in military, scientific and emergency-planning environments.
NVIDIA is also supporting the school through its Deep Learning Institute. The initiative provides NPS faculty with instructional resources and training materials that can be incorporated into graduate programs across multiple academic departments.
The partnership is intended to prepare military leaders for environments in which AI systems can rapidly process information and shorten decision-making timelines. School officials emphasized that technology is meant to support, rather than replace, human judgment, experience and leadership.
The Naval Postgraduate School has already used hackathons and collaborative research projects to advance work involving autonomous systems, ocean research and operational planning.
Researchers are applying AI to model ocean conditions, predict atmospheric changes and create digital representations of complex physical environments. These digital twins can be used to test navigation, planning and decision-making under uncertain conditions without requiring every scenario to be recreated in the physical world.
Through a partnership with MITRE, the school has developed a simulation framework using NVIDIA Omniverse libraries. The framework provides high-fidelity digital twin environments for studying real-world navigation and operational decisions.
The DGX GB300 will provide additional computing capacity for these simulation and modeling projects, allowing researchers to work with larger datasets, more detailed environments and more computationally demanding AI models.
Several technology companies contributed infrastructure and integration support for the installation.
DDN supplied high-performance data infrastructure designed to help researchers access, manage, protect and scale information used by demanding AI workloads.
VAST Data provided a unified data platform supporting secure data management across edge, core and cloud environments.
Vertiv delivered the racks, power and cooling infrastructure required to operate the system. The company also supported installation sequencing, testing, commissioning, fluid management and monitoring.
The combined infrastructure is designed to support the intensive computing, storage and cooling requirements associated with training and running advanced AI models.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our nation depends on our men and women who fight on the front lines. Nothing is more valuable to you than information and insight, and information and insight in a timely way, and to understand its impact and consequence.”
“Leadership is about being in service of something else. You’re in service of your team. You’re in service of your country. You’re in service of your mission. And all of this technology is just tools to help you.”
“The most important advice that I would give to someone is to engage the technology. It’s not as hard as you think it is, and the reason for that is because, on first principles, technology is supposed to get smarter and smarter over time.”
Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA
“As we modernize our technology, we must also modernize how we educate our leaders. Access to advanced computing capability means NPS students and faculty understand the opportunities and responsibilities that come with these technologies.”
“Many of you will command in AI-enabled environments. Information will move at lightning speeds, compressing response times. Our advantage will come from leaders, like you, who can use the technology to see, understand, decide and act faster while exercising the judgment, experience and leadership that machines cannot provide.”
Admiral Samuel Paparo, Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command
