Today Cray announced the Company will provide a Cray Urika-GX system to the Alan Turing Institute through a collaboration between Cray, Intel, and the Institute. Hosted at the University of Edinburgh in the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), the Cray Urika-GX system will provide researchers at the Alan Turing Institute with a dedicated analytics hardware platform, enabling the development of advanced applications across a number of scientific fields including engineering and technology, defense and security, smart cities, financial services and life sciences.
The Alan Turing Institute was created to advance the world-changing potential of data science,” said Sir Alan Wilson, CEO of the Alan Turing Institute. “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.”
The Alan Turing Institute is the United Kingdom’s national institute for data science, and brings together researchers from a range of disciplines to tackle core challenges in data science theory and application. The Institute is named in honor of Alan Turing, whose pioneering work in theoretical and applied mathematics, engineering, and computing are considered to be the key disciplines comprising data science. With the addition of the Cray Urika-GX system, the Institute’s researchers will have access to Cray’s agile analytics platform, which fuses supercomputing technologies with an open, enterprise-ready software framework for big data analytics.
The Alan Turing Institute is quickly becoming a major force in the data sciences community worldwide, and we are thrilled the Cray Urika-GX system will support the Institute’s mission of advancing data science research to change the world for the better,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “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, and the Cray Urika-GX gives our customers a powerful platform for solving this new class of data-intensive problems.”
The Cray Urika-GX agile analytics platform features a scalable analytics software environment designed to support large-scale data science activity. An exclusive feature of the Cray Urika-GX system is the Cray Graph Engine, which leverages the high-speed Aries network interconnect, to provide unprecedented, large-scale graph pattern matching and discovery operations across complex collections of data. Also supported is the Apache Spark cluster engine and the Apache Hadoop software library, both included to provide the tools necessary for large-scale analytics and machine learning operations. When combined, the three environments – Spark, Hadoop and the Cray Graph Engine – enable customers to build complete end-to-end analytics workflows and avoid unnecessary data movement. Underlying the analytics stack, is an open high-performance system featuring the Intel Xeon processor E5 v4 product family, up to 22 terabytes of DRAM memory, and up to 176 terabytes of local Intel P3700 series SSD storage capacity.
The convergence of HPC and analytics are unleashing a global wave of discovery and innovation. The Alan Turing Institute aims to use advanced data science and powerful technology to improve the lives of everyone,” said Trish Damkroger, Vice President of Technical Computing at Intel. “Solution leaders like Cray with their Intel-based Cray Urika-GX system provide the technical foundation to deliver the ever-increasing capabilities needed by leading researchers and scientists.”
Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter
