HPE supercomputer to advance UAE’s global AI leader goals
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced it is building a new supercomputer for Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) to accelerate AI-driven scientific discovery and advance the UAE’s goal to be a global AI leader.
In a statement, HPE said its robust supercomputing and AI technologies will significantly enhance the university’s ability to run complex AI models with extremely large data sets, and increase predictability in research analyses in fields including energy, transportation and the environment.
Since being established in 2019, MBZUAI has been ranked 24th in the world for artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, and natural language processing. HPE said the new supercomputer - which will be housed at the university’s Campus Super Computing Center (CSCC) - will help MBZUAI support the UAE’s National Strategy for AI, bringing together the power of academia, government, and industry to strengthen the country’s global competitiveness.
Supercomputing playing ‘vital role’ in unleashing the power of AI
Vital to delivering AI-at-scale, supercomputing is driving global innovation, industry competitiveness, and economic growth, said HPE. “From accelerating vaccine discovery to fight a pandemic, and advancing clean energy systems to increase sustainability, to enabling new possibilities in AI, supercomputing is a core technology to solving the world’s most challenging scientific and engineering challenges,” the statement added.
“Supercomputing plays an essential role in unleashing AI to achieve significant breakthroughs for organisations 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.”
HPE helping grow UAE’s national strategy for AI
As a recently established institution, MBZUAI is still building its team of in-house supercomputing specialists. By collaborating with HPE, the university is gaining access to a large local team for supercomputing and AI support, in addition to world-leading technologies.
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 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors delivering advanced computational performance, and 384 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs for accelerated compute to target AI model development, training, and inferencing.
“HPE has a longstanding commitment to advancing the way people live and work in the United Arab Emirates, through our Emiratization program, Digital Life Garage, and industry and government partnerships,” said Ahmad Alkhallafi, managing director for UAE, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
“We are proud to support the UAE’s national strategy for AI by helping MBZUAI grow its contribution to research and education. Supercomputing will play a crucial role in helping the UAE anticipate and take advantage of new AI technologies now and in the future. We look forward to helping the UAE meet its goal to be an AI leader by 2031.”
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.
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