Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, has signed a four-year contract worth £5 million with the University of Oxford to deliver a new, state of the art, deep learning supercomputer built on the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD architecture, which will enable UK academics and industry to drive forward scientific discoveries and innovation in machine learning and artificial intelligence, as part of the JADE2 project.
The largest AI-focused supercomputer in the UK with over 500 NVIDIA GPUs, this high-performance system is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and aims to build on the success of the current JADE1 (Joint Academic Data Science Endeavour) facility – a national resource providing advanced GPU computing facilities to world-leading AI and machine learning experts from a consortium of eight UK universities and the Alan Turing Institute.
The purpose of Atos is to help design the future of the information space. Its expertise and services support the development of knowledge, education and research in a multicultural approach and contribute to the development of scientific and technological excellence. Across the world, the Group enables its customers and employees, and members of societies at large to live, work and develop sustainably, in a safe and secure information space.
“The successful delivery of JADE has created more demand among UK researchers and industry for powerful computing facilities which can accommodate high end, data intensive AI workloads. Building on the success of the JADE collaboration with Atos, and by significantly expanding the JADE consortium’s computing capacity, the new Deep Learning supercomputer supplied by Atos will allow us to meet this demand and help many institutions to make some potentially ground-breaking discoveries. It will cement JADE’s status as the de facto national computing facility for academic AI research”, Professor Wes Armour at the University of Oxford said.
Agnes Boudot, Senior Vice President, Head of HPC & Quantum at Atos, concluded: “We are proud to be working with the University of Oxford on the delivery of JADE2, which will provide researchers and industry with more computing power to enable new scientific breakthroughs and innovation in machine learning and AI. We believe this high-performance system, coupled with our expertise, will help the UK to address key AI and machine learning challenges, while supporting the UK’s ambition to be a world-leader in these areas.”
The high-performance system is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and aims to build on the success of the current Joint Academic Data Science Endeavour (JADE1) facility – a national resource providing advanced GPU computing facilities to world-leading AI and machine learning experts from a consortium of eight UK universities and the Alan Turing Institute. As part of the JADE2 project, the new supercomputer will more than triple the capacity of the original JADE machine and provide increased computing capabilities to a wider consortium of over twenty universities.
