Data analytics and AI

E-Infrastructure supporting data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) research.

We offer multiple services through the “Hawk” supercomputer and the “Sparrow” High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) and AI development platform, to enable researchers to capitalise on opportunities provided by the growth in AI and Machine Learning (ML).

Hawk provides access to Graphical Processing Units (GPU) partitions comprising both Nvidia V100 and P100 GPU nodes for increased throughput required by applications such as MatLab, PyTorch and TensorFlow.

Based on OpenStack, the Sparrow system provides high performance data analytics services, to complement the batch-queued High Performance Computing (HPC) service provided by Hawk. With an emphasis on flexibility and ease of use over outright performance, Sparrow is an integrated solution to store, manage, and analyse complex datasets relevant to a range of disciplines.

Key features of Sparrow include support for containerised workloads, handling of controlled-access data to meet security requirements, and support for GPU-accelerated workflows. Storage is provided by Ceph, a flexible and scalable software-defined solution. Ceph provides support for compute platforms including Apache Spark, a distributed processing system used for big data workloads, implemented using the Kubernetes orchestration system for delivering containerised applications.

Ask our experts

The Sparrow service is now in pilot production. Please get in touch to discuss how we can help you to benefit from this latest technology enhancement to the portfolio of centralised research computing services.

If you would like any further information on any of the support services available through ARCCA please do not hesitate to get in touch.