AI Upgrade to Boost Industry Workflow

Hartree Centre’s current AI infrastructure, which builds on an existing collaboration with global digital transformation organisation Atos, is set for an upgrade that will bring high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) in combined workflows to UK industry.

Robin Pinning, Chief Technology Officer for the STFC Hartree Centre, believes that the new capabilities will lead to important economic benefits for businesses:

“By supporting businesses in the adoption of HPC and AI technologies that can enhance the productivity of their people and processes, the Hartree Centre is delivering on its mission to support UK industry in line with the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy. Converging HPC and AI is important as it enables better scaling of solutions to address industry challenges, such as producing production-ready “digital twins” of products and practices which save businesses time and money.”

This hardware upgrade will strengthen the Hartree Centre’s ability to partner with businesses to complete proof of concept projects in deep learning - a specialised form of AI that uses algorithms inspired by the way the human brain operates; making predictions, recognising speech and identifying images.

High-performance NVIDIA V100 data centre GPUs (graphics processing units) will be installed in the Hartree Centre’s Scafell Pike - a BullSequana X1000 supercomputing platform. This will allow users to run GPU versions of AI-enabled modelling and simulation workflows, alongside intuitive visualisation within the centre’s new immersive visual computing facility.

Andy Grant, Vice President, HPC & Big Data, Atos UK&I, said: “It is essential that organisations of all sizes can take full advantage of the computational power offered by platforms like Scafell Pike and, in turn, that the infrastructure is flexible to accommodate unique technologies and expand to meet demand. This means the right solutions for industry can be found as modern technology continues to evolve.”