Today Cray announced that it has partnered with Digital Catapult and its Machine Intelligence Garage in the UK to help organizations of all sizes speed the development of machine intelligence systems. This partnership enables the Machine Intelligence Garage to offer companies the supercomputing power and expertise required to develop and build machine learning and AI solutions.
Our partnership with Cray opens a new door for UK machine intelligence businesses,” said Anat Elhalal, Head of Technology and AI/ML Lead Tech at Digital Catapult. “Cray’s expertise in high-performance computing will give startups much-needed resources to continue the amazing work already underway in the UK for AI and machine learning solutions.”
The Machine Intelligence Garage is a program delivered by Digital Catapult, which supports and promotes advanced digital technology and transformation to drive growth in the UK economy. The effort takes its name from the mythical place garages have in the history of technology. The Machine Intelligence Garage holds an open call every six to 12 weeks to select startups that can benefit most from the computational resources the Machine Intelligence Garage can offer from within the organization or through its partners. It then selects about 30 startups and develops for each a tailored program offering supervision, feedback and a case study of each startup’s corresponding results.
Based on research conducted by the Machine Intelligence Garage, startups in the UK have identified that one of their biggest obstacles to progress in AI is access to exceptionally powerful and fast computational systems,” said Per Nyberg, vice president of market development, artificial intelligence and cloud at Cray. “We’re seeing a convergence between AI and supercomputing as organizations work toward taking AI projects out of beta and into production. The number of AI models that must be trained will only increase and organizations are coming to realize the performance and I/O challenges that will arise. Cray’s innovative architectures and robust compute resources, as well as access to our Cray Accel AI Lab, can help address these challenges and give startups the fundamental tools they need to develop successful machine learning systems and initiatives.”
Cray’s unparalleled leadership in supercomputing, combined with the AI expertise of the UK startup community, can help expand AI across the industry. The Machine Intelligence Garage will give select startups in each chosen group access to the Cray Accel AI Lab, with its comprehensive set of AI tools and programs that let organizations learn, start and scale their AI initiatives. In addition, Cray’s expertise in performance analysis will be a key component of the partnership, as the Machine Intelligence Garage’s research has identified trustworthy benchmarking and performance modeling that will be key as the AI landscape matures.
Throughout the UK we have seen significant artificial intelligence startup activity with financial services, telecom, retail and manufacturing industries leading adoption,” said Helena Schwenk, Research Manager, European Software at IDC. “Startups with complex AI processing requirements can benefit considerably from the availability of supercomputer-class resources throughout their journey of innovation.”
