The UK’s national institute for data science, the Alan Turing Institute, will be provided with a Cray Urika-GX system, thanks to a partnership between the institute, the supercomputing company, and Intel.

Hosted at the University of Edinburgh in the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), the system will be used for the development of advanced applications across scientific fields such as engineering and technology, defense and security, smart cities, financial services and life sciences.

For research, and development

Alan Turing statue
– Wikimedia Commons/Antoine Taveneaux

“The Alan Turing Institute was created to advance the world-changing potential of data science,” Sir Alan Wilson, CEO of the Alan Turing Institute, said.

“Our researchers require powerful computing technology in order to enable their research, and the Cray system, based in the University of Edinburgh, one of our founding university partners, will be an important addition to the Turing’s data science toolkit. We look forward to opening it up to our community of researchers and enabling their innovation to thrive.”

Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray, added: “The Alan Turing Institute is quickly becoming a major force in the data sciences community worldwide, and we are thrilled the Cray Urika-GX system will support the Institute’s mission of advancing data science research to change the world for the better.

“The rise of data-intensive computing – where big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and supercomputing converge – has opened up a new domain of real-world, complex analytics applications, and the Cray Urika-GX gives our customers a powerful platform for solving this new class of data-intensive problems.”

The Cray Urika-GX features Intel’s Xeon E5 v4 product family of processors, with up to 1,728 cores per system. It also supports up to 22 terabytes of memory, up to 35 terabytes of local SSD storage capacity, and the Aries supercomputing interconnect.

Trish Damkroger, VP of technical computing at Intel, said: “The Alan Turing Institute aims to use advanced data science and powerful technology to improve the lives of everyone.

“Solution leaders like Cray with their Intel-based Cray Urika-GX system provide the technical foundation to deliver the ever-increasing capabilities needed by leading researchers and scientists.”