The University of Oxford has signed a £5 million with Atos, provider of hybrid cloud and big data solutions, to deliver what the two organizations say will be the UK’s largest AI-focused supercomputer, a deep learning system built on the Nvidia DGX SuperPOD architecture.
Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the JADE2 (Joint Academic Data Science Endeavor) system will be used by UK academics and industry for AI and machine learning. It is a follow-on to the first JADE facility, which provided GPU computing from a consortium of eight UK universities and the Alan Turing Institute.
The DGX SuperPOD system will comprise a cluster of 63 DGX nodes with 504 Nvidia V100 Tensor Core GPUs interconnected with Nvidia Mellanox InfiniBand networking, fed by DDN’s AI400 storage. It will more than triple the capacity of the original JADE machine, providing increased capabilities to a consortium of more than 20 universities and the Turing Institute.
Nvidia DGX V100
The system will be hosted at the STFC Hartree Centre in Daresbury, near Warrington, UK.
“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,” said Professor Wes Armour, University of Oxford. “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.”
