Bristol unicorn Graphcore joins European project to create AI supercomputing framework
Bristol-based unicorn, Graphcore, has announced its participation in SparCity – a new European project whose goal is to create a supercomputing framework that can specifically harness the power and energy efficiency of sparse computation for emerging AI applications.
As one of the region’s most successful deep tech businesses, Graphcore will be playing a central role in the three-year project to help develop next-generation approaches to artificial intelligence
SparCity has a total budget of 2.6 million Euros and project which involves six organisations across four countries aims to build a sustainable exascale ecosystem and increase Europe’s competitiveness.
The project involves partnerships with Sabanci Universitesi (Turkey), Simula Research Laboratory (Norway), INESC-ID (Portugal), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen (Germany) and Graphcore, with the coordination of Koç University (Turkey).
The main goal of SparCity is to create a supercomputing framework that will provide efficient algorithms and coherent tools specifically designed for maximising the performance and energy efficiency of sparse computations on emerging High Performance Computing systems, while also opening up new usage areas for sparse computations in data analytics and deep learning.
Ola Tørudbakken, GM & SVP Systems at Graphcore, said: “Graphcore is committed to enabling next-generation techniques in AI compute, including innovative approaches to sparsity. Putting new hardware and software tools into the hands of researchers through the SparCity initiative will drive a virtuous cycle of discovery and deployment throughout Europe.”
