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Hartree Centre to take delivery of a new supercomputer


The Hartree Centre


AMD TARGETS MACHINE LEARNING


AMD has announced its latest GPU architecture ‘Vega’, which is designed to address the PC gaming, professional design and machine intelligence markets. These new GPUs are AMD’s latest attempt to compete in high-end GPU markets such as gaming and machine learning and are designed to address data-intensive workloads. They include specific upgrades – such as the use of HBM2 memory technology – that are useful in data intensive applications.


D


igital services company Atos UK&I has announced a collaboration with the UK


Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Hartree Centre, which includes the purchase of the first Bull sequana X1000 supercomputer system in the UK and one of the most powerful in the world. Te collaboration not only


focuses on the new supercomputer but also aims to provide activities designed to address the government’s industrial strategy which encourages closer collaboration between academia and industry. Alison Kennedy, director of the


Hartree Centre, said: ‘Te Hartree Centre works at the leading edge of emerging technologies and provides substantial benefits to the many industrial and research organisations that come to us. Our collaboration with Atos will ensure that we continue to enable businesses, large and small, to make the best use of supercomputing and big data to develop better products and services that will boost productivity and drive growth.’ Tis will include the launch of a


new, UK-based HPC as a service (HPCaaS) which aims to provide access to HPC services for both


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large and small companies through easily accessible cloud portals. In addition to traditional HPC


computing, the new service will also provide ‘deep learning as a service’ (DLaaS), an emerging cognitive computing technique with broad applicability from automated voice recognition to medical imaging. Te collaboration aims to


encourage the use of HPC by small and medium sized businesses – encouraging high-tech innovation among the SME community in the UK. Bull claims that sequana’s


packaging and cooling technology has been designed to accommodate future generations of processor,


Xeon and many-core Xeon Phi processor technology. It has been designed to accommodate future blade systems for deep learning, GPU and ARM-based computing. Te new supercomputer will allow both academic and industrial organisations to try out the latest technology and develop applications using the latest advances in artificial intelligence and high-performance data analytics. Andy Grant, head of big


data and HPC, Atos UK&I said: ‘We believe that our Bull supercomputing technology, people, and collaborative approach will reinforce the Hartree Centre’s


THE COLLABORATION AIMS TO ENCOURAGE THE USE OF HPC BY SMALL AND MEDIUM SIZED BUSINESSES


interconnect and accelerator technology which will allow further upgrades in the future if the Hartree Centre would like to upgrade the system further – taking advantage of more compute-intensive or energy efficient hardware as it becomes available. Te supercomputer will be


approximately 3.4 PFlops when installed, and is composed of Intel


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reputation as a world-class HPC centre of excellence and as the flagship model for industry- academic collaboration. ‘Atos’ HPC innovation also


delivers environmental benefits, as the use of direct liquid cooling technology means that Bull sequana is amongst the most energy-efficient, general-purpose supercomputer ever built.’


In addition to HBM2 memory, the GPUs will feature a new compute engine built on flexible compute units that can natively process 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit or 64-bit operations in each clock cycle. These compute units are optimised to attain significantly higher frequencies than previous generations and their support of variable datatypes makes the architecture highly versatile across workloads. AMD’s announcement refers to data-intensive workloads becoming the norm for many applications – increasing the need for powerful accelerator technologies. Machine learning and AI is a prime example of this, as the market has developed in just the last few years. While the AI market is relatively new, it has been predicted to grow to approximately $16 billion by 2022. Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD said: ‘It is incredible to see GPUs being used to solve gigabyte-scale data problems in gaming to exabyte- scale data problems in machine intelligence. We designed the Vega architecture to build on this ability, with flexibility to address the breadth of problems GPUs will be solving not only today but also five years from now. Our high-bandwidth cache is a pivotal disruption that has the potential to impact the whole GPU market.’


AMD will initially offer three GPUs based on this new Vega architecture which are expected early in 2017.


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