̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Paul Calleja

Minister for AI and Digital Government visits Cambridge to tour the DAWN supercomputer

Anonymous — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 16:34:50 +0000

Feryal Clark MP was welcomed to the ̽��ֱ��’s DAWN supercomputer facility, located on the ̽��ֱ��’s West Cambridge Innovation District, by Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, Professor John Aston, and Dr Paul Calleja, Director of Research Computing Services at the ̽��ֱ��.

Together they toured the DAWN supercomputer and met with representatives from academia and industry partners who have ambitious plans for AI and supercomputing in Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��visit comes as the Government opens a UK-wide call for early access to the new AI Research Resource service, of which DAWN is part of.

Now up and running in its state-of-the-art Data Centre in Cambridge, DAWN is currently the most powerful AI supercomputer in the UK, with more than a thousand top-end Intel graphics processing units (GPUs) operating inside its server stacks. ̽��ֱ��supercomputer’s bespoke innovations in hardware and software result from a long-term co-design partnership between the Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab, directed by Dr Paul Calleja, and global tech leaders Intel and Dell Technologies, with support from the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), StackHPC and UK Research & Innovation.

Our world-leading researchers are exploring how AI can benefit society.

̽��ֱ��Vice-Chancellor, Professor Deborah Prentice, also welcomed the Minister to the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, where they were able to learn about the impact of DAWN and AI on patients, with a demonstration of the advances in healthcare.

Feryal Clark MP later toured the ̽��ֱ��’s latest brain imaging scanner and heard from leading ̽��ֱ�� researchers who are utilising DAWN supercomputing capabilities and AI to improve patient outcomes, and develop new and innovative treatments.

̽��ֱ��Minister moved on to meet with Professor Zoe Kourtzi, whose team are working on improving the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's, for which AI can help develop tools by combining diverse data sources that provider a richer picture of a patient’s brain health. Professor James Brenton also presented on his work developing a comprehensive clinical decision-making support platform that integrates and refines cancer patient data from multiple sources into a single, much more manageable tool. Feryal Clark MP further heard from researcher Bill McGough, who is working on a project to develop an AI tool to detect renal cancers in non-contrast and low-dose CT, to enable kidney screening in the UK.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is home to world-leading researchers in AI, to students enthusiastic about the potential of AI, and to an innovation ecosystem that is successfully translating this research into innovative new start-ups and creating jobs. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ��’s flagship AI@Cam is harnessing the ̽��ֱ��'s interdisciplinary research to drive a new wave of AI innovation that delivers public value.

̽��ֱ��Minister for AI and Digital Government, Feryal Clark MP, visited the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge on the day the Government announced their new AI Action Plan.

Lloyd Mann / ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Left to right: Nicola Ayton, Deputy Chief Executive of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Hospitals (CUH), Feryal Clark MP, Minister for AI and Digital Government, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, Professor Deborah Prentice

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Ambitious goals for Dawn – the UK's fastest AI supercomputer

lw355 — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 06:30:12 +0000

Dawn is now being deployed for use by scientists within Cambridge and across the UK to support ambitious goals in clean energy, personalised medicine and climate.

Cambridge, Intel and Dell join forces on UK’s fastest AI supercomputer

cjb250 — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 10:51:14 +0000

Dawn has been created via a highly innovative long-term co-design partnership between the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, UK Research & Innovation, the UK Atomic Energy Authority and global tech leaders Intel and Dell Technologies. This partnership brings highly valuable technology first-mover status and inward investment into the UK technology sector.

Dawn, supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will vastly increase the country's AI and simulation compute capacity for both fundamental research and industrial use, accelerating research discovery and driving growth within the UK knowledge economy. It is expected to drive significant advancements in healthcare, green fusion energy development and climate modelling.

Dawn Phase 1 and the already announced Isambard AI supercomputer at the ̽��ֱ�� of Bristol will join to form the AI Research Resource (AIRR), a UK national facility to help researchers maximise the potential of AI and support critical work into the potential and safe use of the technology.

Dr Paul Calleja, Director of Research Computing Services at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “Dawn Phase 1 represents a huge step forward in AI and simulation capability for the UK, deployed and ready to use now. Dawn was born from an innovative co-design partnership between ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, UKAEA, Dell Technologies and Intel.

“ ̽��ֱ��Phase 1 system plays an important role within a larger context, where this co-design activity is hoped to continue, aiming to deliver a Phase 2 supercomputer in 2024 which will boast 10 times the level of performance. If taken forward, Dawn Phase 2 would significantly boost the UK AI capability and continue this successful industry partnership.”

World-leading technical teams from the ̽��ֱ��, Intel and Dell Technologies built Dawn, which harnesses the power of both AI and high-performance computing (HPC) to solve some of the world’s most challenging and pressing problems.

Announcing this investment at the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan said: "Frontier AI models are becoming exponentially more powerful. At our AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, we have made it clear that Britain is grasping the opportunity to lead the world in adopting this technology safely so we can put it to work and lead healthier, easier and longer lives.

"This means giving Britain’s leading researchers and scientific talent access to the tools they need to delve into how this complicated technology works. That is why we are investing in building UK’s supercomputers, making sure we cement our place as a world-leader in AI safety."

Professor Emily Shuckburgh, Director of Cambridge Zero and the Institute of Computing for Climate Science said: “ ̽��ֱ��coupling of AI and simulation methods is a growing and increasingly essential part of climate research. It is central to data-driven predictions and equation discovery, both of which are at the fore in climate science.

“This incredible new resource – Dawn – at Cambridge will enable software engineers and researchers at the Institute of Computing for Climate Science to accelerate their work helping to address the global challenges associated with climate change.”

Dawn brings the UK closer to reaching the compute threshold of a quintillion floating point operations per second – one exaflop, better known as exascale. For perspective: every person on earth would have to make calculations 24 hours a day for more than four years to equal a second’s worth of processing power in an exascale system.

Hosted at Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab’s site, Dawn is the fastest AI supercomputer deployed in the UK today and will support some of the UK’s largest-ever workloads across both academic research and industrial domains. Importantly, it is the UK's first step on the road to developing future Exascale system.

Adam Roe, EMEA HPC technical director at Intel, said: “Dawn considerably strengthens the scientific and AI compute capability available in the UK, and it’s on the ground, operational today at the Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab.

“I’m very excited to see the sorts of early science this machine can deliver and continue to strengthen the Open Zettascale Lab partnership between Dell Technologies, Intel and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and further broaden that to the UK scientific and AI community.”

Tariq Hussain, Head of UK Public Sales, Dell Technologies, said: "Collaborations like [this one], alongside strong inward investment, are vital if we want compute to unlock the high-growth AI potential of the UK. It is paramount that the government invests in the right technologies and infrastructure to ensure the UK leads in AI and exascale-class simulation capability.

“It's also important to embrace the full spectrum of the technology ecosystem, including GPU diversity, to ensure customers can tackle the growing demands of generative AI, industrial simulation modelling and ground-breaking scientific research."

Dr Rob Akers, Director of Computing Programmes & Senior Fellow at UKAEA, added: “Dawn will form an essential part of a diverse UKRI supercomputing ecosystem, helping to promote high-fidelity simulation and AI capability ensuring that UK science and engineering is first in the queue to exploit the latest innovation in disruptive HPC hardware. In the short term, Dawn will allow UKAEA’s fusion energy programme to form a powerful and exciting cross-Atlantic partnership with US labs exploiting the new 2ExaFlop AURORA supercomputer at Argonne, Dawn's ‘big sister’.

“Fusion has long been referred to as an ‘exascale grand challenge’. ̽��ֱ��exascale is finally upon us and I firmly believe that the many collaborations coalescing around Dawn will be a powerful ingredient for extracting value promised by the exascale – for the UK to deliver fusion power to grid in the 2040s, to realise Net Zero more generally, to seed high value UK jobs in AI and ‘digital’ and to drive economic growth across the entire United Kingdom.”

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab is hosting Dawn, the UK’s fastest artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer, which has been built by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Research Computing Services, Intel and Dell Technologies.

Dawn Phase 1 represents a huge step forward in AI and simulation capability for the UK, deployed and ready to use now

Paul Calleja

Joe Bishop

Dr Paul Calleja, Director of Dawn AI Service (left) and Professor Richard McMahon, Chair of Cambridge Research Computing Advisory Group and UKRI Dawn Principal Investigator (right) in front of Dawn.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Cambridge receives £10 million in funding for new AI supercomputer

sc604 — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 13:28:23 +0000

̽��ֱ��new AI supercomputer is a £10 million partnership between the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the ̽��ֱ��. Capable of solving the largest scientific and industrial challenges at very high speeds, the supercomputer is supported by Cambridge’s Research Computing Service. ̽��ֱ��aim is to help companies to create real business value from advanced computing infrastructures.

̽��ֱ��supercomputer is part of the UK government’s AI Sector Deal, which involves more than 50 leading technology companies and organisations. ̽��ֱ��deal is worth almost £1 billion, including almost £300 million of private sector investment into AI.

“AI research requires supercomputing capacity capable of processing huge amounts of data at very high speeds,” said Dr Paul Calleja, Director of the ̽��ֱ��’s Research Computing Service. “Cambridge’s supercomputer provides researchers with the fast and affordable supercomputing power they need for AI work.”

In addition to computing power, Calleja and his team will provide training, guidance and support Cambridge researchers, and the wider UK IA industry, to make the most of their data.

“AI projects involving Cambridge researchers are already underway,” said Calleja. “In the life sciences we are working on medical imaging analysis and genomics, and in astronomy, AI is being used as part of the Square Kilometre Array project and research to map exoplanets.”

Cambridge is home to the largest technology cluster in Europe. Over the past decade, start-ups based on AI and machine learning, in Cambridge and elsewhere, have seen explosive growth.

“ ̽��ֱ��UK must be at the forefront of emerging technologies, pushing boundaries and harnessing innovation to change people’s lives for the better,” said Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Matt Hancock. “Artificial Intelligence is at the centre of our plans to make the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a digital business. We have a great track record and are home to some of the world’s biggest names in AI like Deepmind, Swiftkey and Babylon, but there is so much more we can do. By boosting AI skills and data-driven technologies we will make sure that we continue to build a Britain that is shaping the future.”

Building on the commitment made in the government’s modern Industrial Strategy and its AI Grand Challenge, the AI Sector Deal marks the first phase of a major innovation-focused investment drive in AI which aims to help the UK seize the £232 billion opportunity AI offers the UK economy by 2030 (10% of GDP).

̽��ֱ��deal will help establish the UK as a research hotspot, with measures to ensure the innovators and tech entrepreneurs of tomorrow are based in the UK, with investment in the high-level post-graduate skills needed to capitalise on technology’s huge potential.

It includes money for training for 8,000 specialist computer science teachers, 1,000 government-funded AI PhDs by 2025 and a commitment to develop a prestigious global Turing Fellowship programme to attract and retain the best research talent in AI to the UK.

“Artificial intelligence provides limitless opportunities to develop new, efficient and accessible products and services which transform the way we live and work,” said Business and Energy Secretary Greg Clark. “Today’s new deal with industry will ensure we have the right investment, infrastructure and highly-skilled workforce to establish the UK as a driving force in the development and commercial use of artificial intelligence technologies.”

̽��ֱ��UK’s fastest academic supercomputer, based at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, will be made available to artificial intelligence (AI) technology companies from across the UK, in support of the government’s industrial strategy.

Cambridge’s supercomputer provides researchers with the fast and affordable supercomputing power they need for AI work.

Paul Calleja

Photo by Pietro Jeng on Unsplash

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