US federal R&D organisation MITRE is building an AI sandbox to allow US public agencies engaged in areas such as transportation, policing, healthcare and climate protection to develop and test advanced AI-enabled applications. The new sandbox will provide researchers and developers with access to a massive increase in computing power.

The Federal AI Sandbox is expected to be operational by year’s end and will be powered by an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD that enables accelerated infrastructure scale and performance for AI enterprise work and machine learning.

The NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD powering the sandbox is capable of an exaFLOP of performance to train and deploy custom LLMs and other AI solutions at scale.

MITRE will apply the Federal AI Sandbox to its work for agencies in areas including national security, healthcare, transportation, and climate. Agencies can gain access to the benefits of the Federal AI Sandbox through existing contracts with any of the six federally funded research and development centres MITRE operates.

Sandbox capabilities offer computing power to train cutting edge AI applications for government use including large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI tools. It can also be used to train multimodal perception systems that can understand and process information from multiple types of data at once such as images, audio, text, radar, and environmental or medical sensors, and reinforcement learning decision aids that learn by trial and error to help humans make better decisions.

“The recent executive order on AI encourages federal agencies to reduce barriers for AI adoptions, but agencies often lack the computing environment necessary for experimentation and prototyping,” said Charles Clancy, MITRE, senior vice president and chief technology officer. “Our new Federal AI Sandbox will help level the playing field, making the high-quality compute power needed to train and test custom AI solutions available to any agency.”

“MITRE’s purchase of a DGX SuperPOD to assist the federal government in its development of AI initiatives will turbocharge the US federal government’s efforts to leverage the power of AI,” said Anthony Robbins, vice president of public sector, NVIDIA. “AI has enormous potential to improve government services for citizens and solve big challenges, like transportation and cyber security.”