Baskerville High Performance Computing

Baskerville High Performance Computing (Baskerville HPC) is a collaborative project to develop a National Accelerated Compute System.
It is being funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation and an allocation of this service will be available to EPSRC-funded researchers and to its partners including the Franklin.

Baskerville HPC, named after John Baskerville an industrialist from Birmingham famous for the Baskerville font, is a Tier 2 accelerated compute facility which will provide a state-of-the-art platform for graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated computing. It helps researchers to accelerate machine learning algorithms and simulation technology, with wide-ranging applications in computer vision, language processing, molecular modelling, and materials science.

The cutting-edge compute cluster at Birmingham is exactly the system that Franklin needs to address the computation problems in biological imaging. As biological imaging routinely involves the collection of huge quantities of data, and the extraction of information from these images requires significant computational resources.

Already established HPC systems rely heavily on CPU parallelism. These architectures are not designed to handle the large datasets from the Franklin’s instruments as efficiently as an HPC cluster built around GPU acceleration. New workflows built around the GPU architecture will allow biologists at the Franklin to answer questions that were previously intractable.