The Science and Know-how Services Council (STFC), a UK authorities company that carries out analysis in science and engineering, has signed an settlement with Lenovo for the set up of a strong new supercomputer for the STFC Hartree Centre.
Ten instances extra highly effective than its predecessor, however utilizing much less electrical energy because of Lenovo’s direct water cooling, the brand new supercomputer will energy AI analysis for UK business
The brand new supercomputer is a part of the Hartree Centre’s £210 million Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation (HNCDI) programme, which gives UK business entry to state-of-the-art digital applied sciences and experience and is complementary to investments within the wider AI Research Resource (AIRR).
It would assist the HNCDI’s quickly increasing supercomputing and AI actions, and will probably be put in later this 12 months at its new £30 million supercomputing centre, currently under construction.
A leap in supercomputing processing energy
A 44.7 petaflop system, the Lenovo ThinkSystem Neptune will carry out greater than 44 quadrillion floating level operations (calculations) per second.
To place this into context, should you had been to hold out one calculation per second, it could take almost 1400 million years to achieve this quantity.
The brand new GPU-based system (graphics processing unit) is ideal for AI workloads, and marks a big leap for the Hartree Centre’s capabilities, with ten instances the processing energy of its present system, Scafell Pike. Moreover, it will likely be extra power-efficient, taking over much less house and utilizing much less electrical energy per unit of efficiency.
The brand new supercomputer makes use of revolutionary heat water cooling which may scale back power calls for by as much as 40% whereas boosting efficiency by as much as 10%.
Powering UK Business with AI
Situated at STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory, at Sci-Tech Daresbury within the Liverpool Metropolis Area, the Hartree Centre is the UK’s solely supercomputing centre devoted to business engagement. This functionality will drive ahead innovation in business use instances and functions.
Its HNCDI programme performs an important function in equipping companies with abilities and technical information to undertake rising digital applied sciences, together with supercomputing, quantum computing, and AI.
It’s enabling productiveness, innovation and development in UK organisations by way of entry to those superior supercomputing applied sciences, that are sometimes obtainable solely to academia and large-scale business,
Fixing international challenges
On the HNCDI, the brand new supercomputer will probably be strategically positioned to contribute to discovery-led industrial analysis, specializing in options to international challenges in areas akin to:
- climate and local weather modelling
- cleaner power initiatives
- drug discovery
- well being applied sciences
- new supplies
- automotive developments
- authorized functions
This consists of the Hartree Centre’s continued collaboration with the UK Atomic Vitality Authority, which is utilizing the Centre to analysis new reactors for clear nuclear fusion power.
In the end, the brand new supercomputer will scale back the time and value related to making analysis breakthroughs, together with for organisations such because the Met Workplace, Unilever and Rolls Royce, that the Hartree Centre has continued to work with during the last decade.
Kate Royse, director, STFC Hartree Centre, stated: “We’re very excited to be working with Lenovo on our subsequent technology of supercomputer on the Hartree Centre. Our mission is to equip UK business with the information, abilities and compute wanted to completely unlock the potential of superior digital applied sciences. With our new supercomputer we will assist UK business in using massive information and AI applied sciences to allow UK companies to take a number one function internationally on the accountable adoption and exploitation of AI know-how.”
Noam Rosen, EMEA director HPC/AI, Lenovo, stated: “Lenovo is equally keen about our collaboration with the Hartree Centre on its formidable journey to revolutionize HPC and AI capabilities within the UK. Our collaboration is not only about delivering a state-of-the-art supercomputer; it’s about constructing a flexible, strong, and highly effective system tailor-made to satisfy the Centre’s various and evolving wants. From superior modeling and simulation in varied scientific disciplines to pioneering work in AI and machine studying, this new power-efficient supercomputer will probably be a cornerstone for innovation, pushing the boundaries of massive information and AI applied sciences to bolster the UK business’s international management in accountable and moral know-how adoption.”
Mark Thomson, Government Chair, STFC, stated: “STFC’s settlement with Lenovo is an thrilling milestone in our mission to offer UK companies with entry to the important infrastructure and experience that can assist them to develop and succeed on a world scale, which in flip will drive productiveness and job creation. By enabling UK business to undertake superior digital applied sciences, we’re supporting the federal government ambitions to construct a aggressive and revolutionary digital economic system that can each turbo drive financial development and reap societal advantages for the UK, in addition to for the UK to be a world AI superpower.”
The HNCDI new Lenovo supercomputer in numbers:
- The ThinkSystem Neptune can carry out the identical variety of calculations as 20,790 prime quality smartphones
- An hour of calculation on a market main smartphone would take 0.17 seconds
- It will probably maintain 4500 hours of 4k video in its working reminiscence
- It will probably maintain 60,000 hours of 4k video in its arduous disks
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