CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTS
pharmaceutical and research institutions .” Storing vast datasets for big data analysis is only part of the puzzle that Kao Data ’ s Harlow campus is helping to solve , however .
In July of this year , NVIDIA officially launched its Cambridge-1 supercomputer , a $ 100mn project to create the UK ’ s most powerful supercomputer to date , hosted within Kao Data ’ s Harlow campus . “ As the UK ’ s fastest and most powerful supercomputer , Cambridge-1 is focussed on a number of important areas , including digital biology , bioinformatics , and genomics research , and will be transformative for the healthcare industry globally ,” says Myall , adding that Kao ’ s ability to host Cambridge-1 supports the work of its founding partners , which include AstraZeneca , GSK , Oxford Nanopore , King ’ s College London , and Guy ’ s and St Thomas ’ NHS Foundation Trust . Harnessing the power of Cambridge-1 , underpinned by Kao Data ’ s hyper-dense architecture , these partners “ are leveraging AI to gain a deeper understanding of brain diseases like dementia , to design new drugs and to improve the accuracy of finding diseasecausing variations in human genomes ,” Myall explains .
NVIDIA ' s Cambridge-1 isn ’ t the be-all and end-all of Kao Data ’ s support for hyper-dense HPC in the UK and Europe , however . The company also hosts the European Bioinformatics Institute ’ s HPC cluster - a massive web of computing assets and bioinformatic datasets which are accessed more than 80mn times per day by “ researchers across Europe .”
“ Ultimately ,” Myall reflects , “ HPC is the engine behind many of the measures that have helped us begin to fight back against COVID-19 , and it will be instrumental for
disease prevention in future .” But the real challenge - and one of the key reasons behind Kao Data ’ s ability to attract some of the densest , most critical HPC workloads in the region to its campus - is delivering on these monumental HPC demands in a way that mitigates the technology ’ s eye-watering demand for power , especially when those demands can vary dramatically from one project to another .
Green HPC While it ’ s common enough for data centre operators to retrofit more sustainable design
134 October 2021