Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence to receive new supercomputer

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced it’s building a new supercomputer for Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI).

HPE’s supercomputing and AI technologies will help the university create “complex AI models with extremely large data sets, and increase predictability in research analyses in fields, including energy, transportation and the environment”.

The new supercomputer will be housed at MBZUAI’s Campus Super Computing Center (CSCC), to support faculty members, researchers and students.

In addition to meeting the research needs of the faculty and students, the new supercomputer will help MBZUAI fulfil its role as an AI talent developer and innovation hub that brings together the business community to drive entrepreneurship in the AI sector.

The university is already contributing to significant initiatives such as the Emirati Genome Program, which uses AI-based tools to extract and interpret large amounts of complex data resulting from DNA sequencing, and the Abu Dhabi Health Services Company, SEHA, which uses AI algorithms to predict heart attacks.

“Supercomputing plays an essential role in unleashing AI to achieve significant breakthroughs for organizations worldwide, across public and private sectors,” said Justin Hotard, executive vice president and general manager, HPC, AI & Labs, at HPE. “HPE is leading the market in this next frontier by combining supercomputing performance and capabilities with solutions that are purpose-built for AI, to build and train machine learning models at-scale. MBZUAI’s CSCC is demonstrating this capability to unlock new possibilities in AI and strengthen UAE’s position as an AI-driven nation to advance key initiatives in healthcare, sustainability and engineering.”

The new supercomputer will deliver end-to-end technologies, based on the HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 Plus, which is purpose-built for AI and analytics workloads, in addition to modelling and simulation workloads that are critical to scientific research.

As part of the design, HPE will feature 2^nd Gen AMD EPYC processors delivering advanced computational performance, and 384 and 384 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs for accelerated computing to target AI model development, training, and inferencing.

To support AI training needs that require processing and storing large quantities of data, HPE will also deliver four petabytes of storage using HPE’s Cray Clusterstor E1000 parallel storage system, which is built for large-scale systems, to enable expanded storage capacity.

Additionally, with the new supercomputer’s design, MBZUAI will gain sophisticated liquid-cooling capabilities from HPE to efficiently remove heat from high-power devices, including CPUs, GPUs, memory, and switches.

In other news, MBZUAI is collaborating with IBM to advance AI research.  The collaboration aims to provide real-life applications, particularly in the fields of natural language processing, as well as AI applications that seek to further climate and sustainability goals and accelerate discoveries in healthcare.

Read: IBM and MBZUAI sign agreement to advance AI research with new centre