Atos working on UK's largest AI supercomputer

Atos has signed a four-year contract worth £5 million with the University of Oxford to deliver a new deep learning supercomputer. Built on NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD architecture, the new system will enable UK academics and industry to drive innovation in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

International consulting firm Atos is a global leader in digital transformation, and has worked regularly with clients to help them leverage new innovations in order to boost their business outcomes. Recently this has seen the firm win a string of contracts helping to deliver clients with state of the art supercomputer systems.

The latest of Atos’ supercomputing partnerships sees it collaborate with the prestigious University of Oxford, to create the largest AI supercomputer in the UK. The new four-year contract worth £5 million will see Atos work with the university to deliver a new system based around NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD architecture, enabling UK academics and industry to make significant developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Agnès Boudot,  Senior Vice President, Head of HPC & Quantum at Atos, commented, “We are proud to be working with the University of Oxford on the delivery of JADE2, which will provide researchers and industry with more computing power to enable new scientific breakthroughs and innovation in machine learning and AI. We believe this high-performance system, coupled with our expertise, will help the UK to address key AI and machine learning challenges, while supporting the UK’s ambition to be a world-leader in these areas.”

The high-performance system is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and aims to build on the success of the current Joint Academic Data Science Endeavour (JADE1) facility – a national resource providing advanced GPU computing facilities to world-leading AI and machine learning experts from a consortium of eight UK universities and the Alan Turing Institute. As part of the JADE2 project, the new supercomputer will more than triple the capacity of the original JADE machine and provide increased computing capabilities to a wider consortium of over twenty universities.

Professor Wes Armour of the University of Oxford remarked, “The successful delivery of JADE has created more demand among UK researchers and industry for powerful computing facilities which can accommodate high end, data intensive AI workloads. Building on the success of the JADE collaboration with Atos, and by significantly expanding the JADE consortium’s computing capacity, the new Deep Learning supercomputer supplied by Atos will allow us to meet this demand and help many institutions to make some potentially ground-breaking discoveries. It will cement JADE’s status as the de facto national computing facility for academic AI research.”