In August 2021 we were pleased to announce a substantial investment in our Computational Shared Facility (CSF) as part of The Research Lifecycle Programme’s (RLP) ‘compute and capacity project’, which aims to expand computational capacity and resources at the University. We are now able to announce further investments which will help meet the ever increasing demand from University researchers - and teaching and learning - for computational resources and to enable the University to be competitive with other Russell Group institutions.

The further principle investments are again from the Faculty of Science and Engineering: Prof. Samuel Kaski (Turing Artificial Intelligence World-Leading Researcher Fellow) has invested in both CPU and GPU resources for his research which aims to overcome a fundamental limitation of current AI systems, mainly that they require a detailed specification of the goal before they can help; the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering (MACE) are investing in CPU and GPU resources to support undergraduate (UG) and taught postgraduate (PGT) project work, and also cloud-based resources for class-based work. MACE is also directly funding support of these resources within the Research Infrastructure Team, for at least three years.

As a result of these investments, we now have 100 Nvidia GPUs in production in the CSF, including 32 A100s, with 20 more A100s on order.

Although RLP and Research IT’s principal role is to support research, FSE’s investments means that their Masters and Undergraduate students are also well supported in using the CSF for their computational work.

For the research community, these investments in the CSF will ensure that researchers can run more computational work and larger computations. This will particularly benefit groups who do research in, but not limited to, Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, computational chemistry, chemical engineering, pharmacy and bioinformatics. With this increase in computational power, researchers can now get research done faster and attempt computational problems of a scale that previously exceeded our capabilities.

Everyone in the research community can benefit from these new resources, even if their research group did not contribute towards the investment. Priority is given to the research groups and schools that have contributed towards the CSF, however when those groups aren’t using the resources, other research groups can make use of it.

If you’d like to find out more about the CSF, you can visit the Research IT webpage, or contact the team.