CeADAR Centre gets €247K funding for a New Super Computer – called LEON

CeADAR, Ireland’s applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) centre, has received €247,000 in funding from Enterprise Ireland’s Capital Funding Programme for a new supercomputer to help Irish companies engage in big data and AI projects.

CeADAR, which is Ireland’s National Centre for Applied Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, is an Enterprise Ireland and IDA-funded technology centre.

This new powerful, high-performing computing platform, which will be called LEON, will be a great addition to CeADAR’s existing computing and storage infrastructure.

It is intended to provide industry in Ireland with access to critical, leading-edge infrastructure which, coupled with CeADAR’s expertise in analytics and AI, will help business exploit the latest advances in AI techniques and platforms.

Companies in Ireland, with CeADAR’s expertise, can now develop and trial new and innovative big data solutions, upskill their workforce, and grow expertise in data science and machine learning. The resource will also be available to start-ups and will foster the creation of new spin-out companies.

The new platform will meet the increasing demands of industry in terms of processing, modelling and storage of large datasets. As CeADAR’s mission is to help companies embrace and innovate using AI, the new high-performance computer will complement the centre’s expertise in advanced machine learning.

CeADAR is to receive the funding after it was one of the successful applicants of the Capital Equipment Fund, administered by Enterprise Ireland through the Technology Gateway and Technology Centre Programmes.

A total of 37 successful applicants from across the third-level sector have secured over €6 million in funding.

The Capital Funding Programme provides industry with access to critical, leading-edge equipment and infrastructure which will help them to build resilience and to remain globally competitive, particularly in the face of challenges such as those posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The winners were selected through a rigorous evaluation process based and the successful applicants were announced by Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation Heather Humphreys TD.

CeADAR is a market-focused technology centre for innovation and applied research in AI, Machine Learning and Data Analytics. Its primary focus is on delivering industry prototypes, and technology demonstrators to business and industry in Ireland.

CeADAR, which is an Enterprise Ireland and IDA-funded Technology Centre, has more than 90 member companies across a wide span of industries.

CeADAR Director Edward McDonnell said:

“This new high-performance computer will find application across every industry sector and will be used by the widest possible number of companies. The computing platform should be seen as an enabling technology in conjunction with the expertise in the Centre in applying cutting-edge AI and analytics methodologies to solve real-world challenges and develop new businesses.”

CeADAR Head of Innovation & Development Ricardo Simon Carbajo said:

“CeADAR, as the designated Digital Innovation Hub in Ireland for AI, now has the capability to provide a powerful data science compute platform as a shared resource to our industry members and for collaborative projects at national and European level.”

‘LEON’, the high-performance computer

The new Data Science Computing Platform has already been christened “LEON”. Provided by Dell, LEON will feature a head node controlling a set of computing nodes each of them equipped with 2 Intel Xeon Gold 6248 processors at 2.5GHz (up to 3.9Hz) with 20 Cores, 768GB of RDIMM at 2933MT/s, and 4 NVIDIA GPU Tesla V100 SXM2 with 32GB. This architecture is scalable by adding more computing nodes to fit the needs of the future.

In the same vein, a dedicated and isolated scalable storage system has been incorporated in the design composed of two redundant nodes using the Dell EMC Storage Array scaling to 4PB. A data management web portal sitting at the head node will allow CeADAR to give secure access to multiple users in the university, technology centres and industry to run heavy data science workloads using multiple Machine Learning Frameworks and Libraries.