University deploys largest IBM POWER9 AI cluster in the UK!
Researchers at the University of Birmingham are set to benefit from the largest IBM® POWER9™ Artificial Intelligence (AI) computer cluster in the UK.
The University will integrate a total of 11 IBM POWER9 systems into its existing high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, the Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR).
The system, which is being delivered by IT Services’ multi award winning Advanced Research Computing (ARC) team, will deliver unprecedented performance for the ever-increasing AI workloads generated by the University’s researchers, delivering ground-breaking computational vision analysis and helping to solve life sciences challenges, such as improving cancer diagnosis.
Professor Tim Softley, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Transfer at the University, was instrumental in helping secure funding for the clusters, he said, “Having outstanding facilities is essential to our delivery of research that matters. This investment in new infrastructure and our growing partnership with IBM will benefit all disciplines but is particularly relevant to our exciting research into artificial intelligence and our partnership with the Alan Turing Institute.”
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In other news…..
HPCwire award winners
We’re really pleased to announce that the University of Birmingham has again won a HPCwire Readers’ Choice Award, this year for Best Use of HPC in Manufacturing. The award was presented at the 2018 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC18), in Dallas, Texas.
Each year the Advanced Research Computing team submits a number of nominations for these prestigious awards to help showcase the research being carried out using BEAR and HPC services across campus. This year we had four shortlisted nominations for the HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards which were determined through a nomination and voting process with the global HPCwire community, as well as selections from the HPCwire editors.
The University received the award for the research undertaken by members of the PRISM2 research group in Metallurgy and Materials Science using the BlueBEAR HPC service.
The awards are an annual feature of the HPCwire publication and constitute prestigious recognition from the HPC community. These awards are revealed each year to kick off the annual super-computing conference, which showcases high performance computing, networking, storage, and data analysis.
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