Data science research pioneered by the Alan Turing Institute
The Alan Turing Institute, a new data science research organisation based in London, has formed a partnership with Cray and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to enhance the UK's data sciences community. This collaboration aims to leverage Cray's high-performance computing (HPC) resources and expertise, contributing to the scaling of complex data science workflows and AI simulations.
Potential Applications Across Sectors
The research conducted by the Alan Turing Institute has the potential to be applied across diverse sectors, including AI security, environmental challenges, public sector efficiency, money laundering detection, and predictive weather modeling. Their projects range from advancing AI system security to applying machine learning for environmental sustainability, and improving public sector workflows with generative AI.
Providing High-Performance Computing Resources
Cray's partnership is expected to provide the much-needed HPC resources and expertise critical for scaling complex data science workflows and AI simulations. The Turing Institute works with national compute clusters to deliver open, platform-agnostic Trusted Research Environments suitable for HPC infrastructures, enabling research to be deployed on any high-performance computing cluster.
Impactful Applications Across Industries
Together, this partnership can enable cutting-edge data science solutions with the speed, scale, and security demanded by real-world problems across sectors such as government, finance, environmental science, and social systems modeling. This partnership is set to accelerate the translation of research into impactful applications.
The Alan Turing Institute's Background
The Alan Turing Institute is a joint venture between the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, Warwick, University College London, and the UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC). The Institute received initial funding in excess of £75 million ($110 million) from the UK government, the university partners, and other business organisations, including the Lloyd's Register Foundation.
The Institute's mission is to bring together people, organisations, and technologies in data science for the development of theory, methodologies, and algorithms. The Institute will research how knowledge and predictions can be extracted from large-scale and diverse digital data.
A Pioneering British Computer Scientist
Alan Turing, a pioneering British computer scientist, has become a household name in the UK due to his role in breaking the Enigma machine ciphers during the Second World War. After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory where he designed ACE, one of the first stored-program computers. Turing was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine.
Genomics Data Analysis and ARCHER Supercomputer
One problem that might require such processing power is the analysis of genomics data, as Genomics England is collecting around 200 GB of DNA sequence data from each of 100,000 people. The EPSRC's ARCHER supercomputer, a Cray XC30 system based at the University of Edinburgh, has been chosen for this work. ARCHER is currently the largest supercomputer for scientific research in the UK, with its recent upgrade providing access to over 300 TB of memory.
Workshops and Data Science Summits
The Alan Turing Institute has organised a wide range of workshops and data science summits, details of which can be found on their website. UK Minister for Science and Universities, Jo Johnson, paid tribute to Alan Turing at the launch of the institute. Duncan Roweth, principal engineer and CTO of Cray, is based in Bristol, UK.
This partnership between Cray and the Alan Turing Institute is set to revolutionise data science research in the UK, benefiting both research and industry.
- Leveraging Cray's high-performance computing resources and expertise, as a result of the partnership with the Alan Turing Institute, could contribute significantly to the analysis of large-scale genomics data, such as the 200 GB of DNA sequence data from each of 100,000 people being collected by Genomics England.
- The collaboration between the Alan Turing Institute, Cray, and the EPSRC has the potential to drive advancements in various sectors, such as science, including genomics, by enhancing the UK's data science community and scaling complex data science workflows and AI simulations.
