Cray has announced that it will provide a URIKA-GX supercomputer to the Alan Turing Institute through a collaboration between Cray, Intel, and the Turing Institute.
Hosted in the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center (EPCC) at the University of Edinburgh, the new Cray URIKA-GX system will provide the researchers at the Turing Institute with a dedicated analytics platform to assist in the development of innovative big data analytics applications across a number of fields.
The Cray URIKA-GX system supports large-scale data analytics, necessary for the development of real-world big data applications at the Turing Institute. The URIKA system includes the Cray Graph Engine, which allows large-scale matching and discovery operations in complex datasets through the high-speed Aries interconnect. It also supports the Apache Spark cluster engine and Apache Hadoop software library, which support analytics workflows with speed and efficiency.
The URIKA system features Intel Xeon processors with 22 TB DRAM and 176 TB of local Intel SSD capacity.
Peter Ungaro, President and CEO of Cray, said that the URIKA-GX will support the Turing Institute’s mission of using data science to change the world. “The rise of data-intensive computing – where big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and supercomputing converge – has opened up a new domain of real-world, complex analytics applications,” he said, “and the Cray Urika-GX gives our customers a powerful platform for solving this new class of data-intensive problems.”
The Turing Institute, headquartered at the British Library, is the national institute for data science in the United Kingdom. It brings researchers and data scientists from different disciplines together to work on data science theory and application. Core areas of research at the Institute include cybersecurity, data engineering, smart cities, healthcare, data ethics and the economy.
Research conducted at the Turing Institute is applied to real-world issues, with researchers partnering with subject-matter experts in industry, government and non-governmental community organizations (NGOs).
The new URIKA-GX system, which combines supercomputing technology with a big data analytics software framework, will allow the Turing Institute to develop advanced applications in various fields, including finance, engineering, defense, and life sciences.
Sir Alan Wilson, CEO of the Alan Turing Institute, said that the mission of the Institute is to advance the “world-changing potential of data science.”
“Our researchers require powerful computing technology in order to enable their research, and the Cray system, based in the University of Edinburgh, one of our founding university partners, will be an important addition to the Turing’s data science toolkit. We look forward to opening it up to our community of researchers and enabling their innovation to thrive.”
