The UK is to get its first high performance and data analytics centre with the promise of driving national economic growth.
The idea is that using modelling and data analytics over high performance computing can deliver UK economic growth. This will be achievable through optimising HPC on IBM’s OpenPOWER systems for better Big Data analytics, modelling and simulation.
Dr Peter Allan, acting Director of the Hartree Centre, said: The PADC will help the Government’s ambition to provide world-leading facilities to enable UK businesses use Modelling & Simulation and Big Data Analytics to develop better products and services that will boost productivity, drive growth and create jobs."
The centre is to be created in collaboration with NVIDIA, Mellanox and the Science and Technology facilities Council. It is branded as the POWER Acceleration and Design Centre and is hosted at the Hartree Centre, Daresbury, which is also home to the IBM supercomputer Blue Joule.
Staff from IBM Research, NVIDIA and the Hartree Centre will provide consultation to help improve the performance for GPU-accelerated OpenPOWER systems.
The goal is to achieve the highest levels of performance by exploiting all components of the system, this includes architecture, memory, storage, interconnects and integration.
The centre will host a POWER-based system with the Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform, which consists of NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerations and enabling software.
