The University of Bath has powered up its research and innovation capability by becoming the first UK university to move all possible high performance computing workloads into the cloud.
Named ‘Nimbus’, the switch to Microsoft Azure Cloud will rapidly speed up scientific discovery processes and allow researchers to carry out more advanced computationally intensive research in a fraction of the time usually required.
During tests, researchers found that Nimbus allows them to complete research, which would typically take three years, in just three months.
It also demonstrates the potential of the system, one of the most advanced systems at any university in the world, to exponentially accelerate and intensify research to find important solution to global challenges.
Academics have already used it to advance research into lifesaving medical devices, new materials for batteries and to optimise important machine learning algorithms.
University of Bath vice-chancellor and president Prof Ian White, pictured, said: “Our new Nimbus research computing infrastructure opens up many new possibilities for innovation and represents a major step forward for our research capabilities.
“This access to huge computational power will be an important tool in our armoury as we seek to achieve our ambitious research goals and tackle major societal challenges in areas such as energy, transport, public health and sustainable living.”
The platform includes advanced AI and machine learning capabilities and can be continually updated to add the latest, most advanced tools, without needing to pause ongoing work, all in a secure environment.
In addition to its research benefits, Nimbus has allowed several University of Bath courses that involve computer science and mathematics, to be fully migrated to the cloud, so improving students’ programming literacy and giving them better awareness of the cloud HPC environments they will encounter in the world of work.
Nimbus is the central pillar in the university’s new portfolio of cloud research computing environments, which is available to all Bath researchers and PhD students.
As well as the new Nimbus supercomputer, this includes cloud high performance computing (HPC) teaching clusters and a small onsite HTC (high throughput cluster) which runs software applications that cannot run in the cloud.
Bath’s move to full cloud supercomputing coincides with a warning from the Alan Turing Institute, the national body for data science and artificial intelligence, that the UK’s computing capacity is under-resourced and running at capacity.
Speakers at a launch event for Nimbus included Richard Lawrence, IT Fellow in Supercomputing at The Met Office, and Laura Parry, senior HPC + AI Specialist at Microsoft, while university staff explained how it will be used to advance research in areas such ranging from climatology to adult memory impairment, and from quantum chemistry to nanomaterials.
