A deep learning research initiative led by the University of Oxford has built a HPC system, the Joint Academic Data Science Endeavour (JADE), which will be made available as a public cloud service to the Universities of Edinburgh, Sheffield, King’s College London, Queen Mary University of London, University College London (UCL), and Oxford University itself.

French tech giant Atos will provide the hardware – 22 Nvidia DGX1 Deep Learning servers, each containing eight Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs, totaling 176 GPUs and a total power of 492.2 teraflops - and the system will be hosted at the STFC Hartree Centre in Daresbury, Liverpool.

HPC in the UK 

Oxford University
Oxford University – Thinkstock

The £3m ($3.95m) project was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), as part of the research funding agency’s £20m ($26.35m) investment in UK HPC systems for British Universities. 

Five other initiatives have received a percentage of the funding: the University of Bristol’s GW4 Tier-2 HPC Centre for Advanced Architectures, Cambridge’s Peta-5 facility for petascale data intensive computation and analytics, UCL’s Tier-2 hub in Materials and Molecular Modelling, Loughborough’s HPC Midlands Plus and Edinburgh’s Tier-2 Parallel Computing Centre.

Data science and molecular dynamics researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Southampton will also be granted access to the system.