Lenovo partner in £4m supercomputer deal with university
New compute facility will be provided by Lenovo
The University of Birmingham has won £4m to develop a high performance compute (HPC) system via its framework partner OCF.
The system will be provided by Lenovo via OCF, which will support the logistics of delivering the system.
OCF underwent an MBO in November last year and its revenues for its year ending 31 March 2019 stood at £16.5m, according to reports filed on Companies House.
The new university facility is aimed at helping researchers to accelerate the scientific discovery process and is a joint venture between the University of Birmingham, The Rosalind Franklin Institute, The Alan Turing Institute and Diamond Light Source. It is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
"Access to accelerated computing is now a major bottleneck in computational research," stated Professor Iain Styles, director of the university's Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
"This facility will serve to accelerate progress in areas such as materials design, drug development and in machine learning research and all of its applications. We are delighted to be able to provide this new capacity to researchers at the university; at our partners - Diamond Light Source, the Rosalind Franklin Institute, The Alan Turing Institute and to the wider EPSRC research community."
The Tier 2 HPC facility is expected to provide a state-of-the-art platform for graphics processing unit-accelerated computing, as well as accelerated machine learning algorithms and simulation technology.
The system will be housed at the University of Birmingham's dedicated research datacentre, which opened in 2018 and was the result of a £6m investment by the university and equipped with highly efficient liquid cooling infrastructure.
Simon Thompson, research computing infrastructure architect at the University of Birmingham stated: "The system we have designed provides an optimised solution based on scale-out hardware and will deliver some of the latest generations of accelerated compute to our researchers.
"Through our investment in liquid cooling, we are well placed to support accelerated computing both now, and in the future and we look forward to the challenges of delivering a Tier 2 facility to the UK."
Scott Tease, general manager of HPC and AI at Lenovo added: "We have worked in partnership with the University of Birmingham for a number of years and we are proud to have it as a founding member in our Project Everyscale, a global consortium of leading HPC visionaries.
"As one of our longest-standing HPC partners, we're delighted to be supplying this system under our early access programme and Birmingham is one of the few UK sites which is able to take such a system thanks to following its strategic investment in liquid cooling infrastructure."