NVIDIA Academic Grant Program: AI Training and Model Development

NVIDIA solicits proposals for innovative projects related to generative AI, particularly small and large language models, multimodal models, and diffusion models, with focus on training techniques, scaling, customization, and exploring new architectures for AI systems.

Overview

• Compute resources: Up to 30,000 H100 80 GB GPU hours or equivalent (maximum of eight concurrent GPUs)
• GPU hours expire six months after award; unused hours will be forfeited
• Award amount determined by NVIDIA awards panel
• Required technology integration: Projects leveraging AI models must incorporate NVIDIA models, such as NVIDIA Nemotron™, wherever possible. All others must make extensive use of NVIDIA software and AI distributions, such NVIDIA Megatron-Core, Megatron-LM, NeMo™ microservices, BioNeMo™, or FLARE™

Priority Areas

Techniques for Training, Scaling, and Customizing Gen AI:

• Training: Explore novel approaches and techniques for training AI models, including improvements in scalability, compute efficiency, data efficiency, agentic capability, or safety, security, and privacy in decentralized and federated learning settings. Develop open, rigorous benchmarks to evaluate NVIDIA Nemotron and other foundation models to identify strengths, limitations, and failure modes of models
• Distillation: Explore new ways for using large pretrained models to jump-start the training of derivative/smaller models or to enhance the abilities of existing models on specific domains with the use of in-domain expert teachers
• Fine-Tuning/Post-Training: Propose novel methods or adaptations of existing methods for post-training pretrained models for increased performance on specific tasks, domains, or languages. Design open, high-quality training data and evaluation benchmarks, aiming to achieve superior predictive performance and/or low computational cost. Research areas might include AI for hardware design and verification, enhanced agentic capabilities, and advanced mathematical reasoning

Exploring New Approaches and Architectures for Gen AI:

• Multimodality: Delve into the intersection of vision, language, speech, and other modalities, aiming to develop models that can seamlessly understand or generate content across diverse data modalities, possibly under low-latency constraints and in response to incremental inputs in real time. Research areas may also include federated learning with missing multimodalities
• Modularity: Investigate architectures with modular aspects, such as mixture of expert networks, dynamic models, or model routing systems

Eligibility & Requirements

Eligible Applicants:

• Full-time faculty at accredited academic institutions that award research degrees to Ph.D. students are eligible
• Postdocs and graduate students must work with a full-time faculty member to submit on their behalf

Submission Limits:

• Each person can submit one proposal per quarter, a maximum of four proposals annually
• Example: one submission is allowed in the first quarter, January–March
• Each individual applicant is eligible to receive one award per calendar year

Proposal Requirements:

• Proposals must follow the proposal template and should not exceed four pages, not including appendices
• Must incorporate required NVIDIA technologies as specified in Overview section

Selection Process:

• Not all projects that meet eligibility requirements will be selected for an award
• The final award amount will be determined by the NVIDIA awards panel

Recipient Expectations:

• Award recipients should make reasonable efforts to acknowledge the support of NVIDIA
• Corporation and reference how specific hardware and software contributed to project results
• Recipients will inform NVIDIA of publications, presentations, open-source code and data releases, and speaking engagements that reference the supported project via the NVIDIA academic grant portal
• Failure to report in the portal will influence future award selection
• Must review NVIDIA Academic Grant Program terms and conditions

Timeline

• Submission window: Quarterly cycle 
• Award duration: GPU hours expire six months after award date
• Reporting: Ongoing obligation to report publications and presentations via NVIDIA academic grant portal

How to Submit:

• Follow NVIDIA proposal template (not exceeding four pages, excluding
  appendices)
• Submit proposal through NVIDIA academic grant portal
• Ensure proposal aligns with one or more of the two main research themes specified
• Include plan for incorporating required NVIDIA models and/or software 

Please note: Full RFP is attached in the "More Information" section of this page. Faculty and researchers interested in applying for these opportunities based on technologies developed or disclosed at Vanderbilt must submit their proposals through the CTTC.