JADE consortium wins £5.5 million funding for High Performance Computing

The JADE consortium has won £5.5 million funding for High Performance Computing. JADE 2, hosted at STFC’s Hartree Centre, will be a unique national computing facility dedicated to research in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI)/ Machine Learning and Molecular Dynamics, a computer simulation method for predicting the physical movements of particles that make up molecules.

The project aims to build on the success of the current JADE HPC resource and is funded by a £5.5 million grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The JADE consortium is led by the Department of Engineering Science Institute, the Oxford e-Research Centre, with Professor Wes Armour the Principal Investigator.

JADE 1 and 2 will form the de-facto national AI computing facility in the UK and will support over £0.5B of UK funded research. The service will provide a valuable computing resource to the new UKRI Artificial Intelligence Centres for Doctoral training, and thus provide critical computational capacity needed to develop the next generation of AI experts. The AI techniques developed using the service will deliver advances to a wide range of sectors, and the Molecular Dynamics research conducted on JADE 2 will advance computational drug design for therapeutics targeting a large variety of health conditions and assist with designing components of DNA/RNA sequencing devices.

Professor Armour says, “JADE and JADE 2 will form a unique national resource providing a state-of-the-art 700+ GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) computing facility for research into AI / Machine Learning and Molecular Dynamics. Through the diverse collection of JADE consortium members, JADE 2 will deliver AI advances across a wide range of different sectors, financial services, manufacturing, retail, the public sector, energy and healthcare. By supporting the new UKRI Artificial Intelligence Centres for Doctoral training, JADE 2 will support the education of the next generation of researchers in AI, who in turn will keep the UK at the forefront of the AI revolution for many years to come.”

The Jade consortium partners are Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cambridge, Exeter, Lancaster, Leeds, Loughborough, Sheffield, Southampton, Surrey, Warwick and York, Queen Mary University of London, King’s College London, Imperial College London, UCL, Newcastle University, The Alan Turing Institute, Science and technology Facilities Council laboratories.