Data center provider Sudlows has been awarded an £18 million ($22.1m) contract to deliver the mechanical and electrical services for a new high-performance computing (HPC) data center in the UK.
Sudlows was awarded the contract by Russell WHBO which is the lead contractor for the new facility that will house advanced supercomputer systems.
The supercomputing center will span 33,000 sq ft (3,066 sqm), use liquid cooling, and will be connected to a private HV network.
Head of sustainability and innovation at Sudlows, Zac Potts, said: “The Sudlows Team are proud to have been selected as the specialist partner in the delivery of the critical M&E for the prestigious STFC Super Computer Centre Project. The project aligns perfectly with Sudlows’ commitment to sustainability in the delivery of highly specialized critical facilities, and it is particularly exciting to see our expertise support the world-class research STFC delivers in areas such as AI and quantum computing.”
The £18m contract is part of the £210 million ($257.4m) investment into the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Liverpool-based Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation from the UK government and IBM, announced in June 2021.
In the original announcement, it was revealed that the new facility will increase the Hartree Centre’s supercomputing footprint with an AI and quantum computing-focused facility. It will also take steps towards the UK’s goal of its first exascale supercomputer.
Earlier this month, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak announced that he was looking to spend £800 million ($950m) on a new UK supercomputer. The nation is looking to become a 'science and technology superpower by 2030.'
National Computational Infrastructure completes AU$40m upgrade to Gadi supercomputer
In other HPC news, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) has completed the first phase of an AU$40 million (US$26m) upgrade to its Gadi supercomputer.
The Gadi supercomputer, first announced in 2019, is located in Canberra, Australia, at the Australian National University and offers a peak performance of 10 petaflops.
The new system’s full spec has 78,000 CPU cores in its 1440 52-core Sapphire Rapid Xeon processors, 720 compute nodes, 369TB of memory, and an NVIDIA 200 Gbps Infiniband interconnect, giving Gadi a total of over 250,000 processor cores and 100,000TB of data storage.
“The system will speed up research tasks and provide users with more access than ever before to one of the most powerful supercomputers in the country,” NCI said in a statement.
The upgrade was funded by the Department of Education, and the NCI Collaboration which comprises CSIRE, the Australian National University, the Bureau of Meteorology, and the University of New South Wales among others.