High performance computing can help fast-track SME growth and innovation, writes Newland McKelvey, Fujitsu.
Do you conduct large-scale research projects or need to analyse large datasets? Ever wondered what access to a supercomputer could do to turbocharge your projects? Fujitsu’s new High Performance Computing (HPC) Service brings a supercomputing service to Northern Ireland for the first time, something which has the potential to add significant competitive advantage to a wide range of local businesses and researchers. For the first time many will now be able to access world-class, secure and easy-to-use high performance computing technology which is critical to solving advanced computational problems, but at high speed and at a fraction of the cost. High performance computing essentially speeds up computationally heavy tasks turning processing time of months to days and days to hours and minutes.
The technology is designed to support the development of Northern Ireland’s knowledge economy and has the potential to fast-track product innovation, knowledge capital and commercially focused research application, not to mention the associated job creation. We want to help more Northern Ireland businesses to compete on the world stage – be that in software, healthcare, manufacturing, creative industries or agriculture- and are very excited about the HPC’s prospects to help more increase their competitive edge.
A similar service has been operational in Wales for some time and has already been used across a number of industry sectors including Advanced Materials, Engineering and Manufacturing, Creative Industries, Energy and Environment, Financial and Professional Services, ICT and Life Sciences, resulting in many new innovations, company developments and job creation.
With our initial investment plans, we want to collaborate with local SMEs and researchers to support their innovation strategies. Two local companies have already seen first hand the enabling power it brings.
PathXL, a global pioneer in the use of web-based solutions for digital pathology based at the Northern Ireland Science Park has used it to speed up their analysis of tumours using digital imagery.
Speaking at our recent HPC launch Professor Peter Hamilton, VP Research and Development at Path XL explained the key benefits of the service “Our area of business is looking at very large medical images, being able to analyse those images quickly, cost effectively and being able to detect cancer within those images. This just cannot be achieved successfully with normal computer technology so high performance computing and the ability to parallelize difficult complex computational tasks is really important. Fujitsu has provided us with the framework and the capability of doing that. This allows us to accelerate our research and development program within Northern Ireland, allowing us to deliver new solutions that are going to help with cancer diagnostics in the future.”
One of the challenges that PathXL faced was that the digital tissue images they analyse are enormous, probably the largest images currently generated in medical practice, with many millions of slides being generated annually in cancer diagnostic and research labs across the country. It became clear that conventional computer processing was not sufficient to analyse these tissue images with the precision, accuracy and importantly, the speed that was needed.
The HPC Service is now providing PathXL with essential architecture to deliver the processing speed that it needs in its ongoing research and development program. Having already moved its software across to the Fujitsu HPC platform PathXL believe that this will really reduce the tissue analysis time significantly, allowing it to develop, test and deliver its cancer detection software more quickly and cost effectively than they have been able to do previously. This will allow companies like PathXL to continue to develop world leading solutions in medical image analysis and cancer diagnostics.
The Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT), the Queen’s University centre which commercialises research and expertise in cyber security has used the service to test facial recognition software to assist tracking people in real time using CCTV.
Stephen Wray, Commercial Director at ECIT commented on the difference HPC has made to their work: “Cybersecurity as an industry has a fundamental requirement for high performance computing. We trialled the service on video processing which involved running simulations on huge amounts of CCTV video data which normally takes days to run but we were able to speed that up dramatically.”
ECIT found two main benefits of Fujitsu’s HPC service - one is the performance enhancement and the computer capacity that the service offered, while the other was the support service which was tailored to their specific needs and optimised to their requirements.
ECIT are linked to some of the emerging cluster of cybersecurity companies around Northern Ireland. These companies are developing technologies and solutions in a landscape where there is an increasing amount of data and a need to analyse that data in real-time. Many are start-up or small companies, who cannot afford to build their own high performance computing infrastructure and why would they whenever this service not only offers access to some of the fastest and most powerful computers available but also the expertise and tools needed to perform the computational tasks required.
Working with our partner HPC Wales, we are now offering small and medium enterprises in Northern Ireland access to the UK’s largest distributed supercomputing network through a simple web browser. Supercomputing enables research to be completed quicker, products to reach market earlier and production costs to be reduced significantly. In many cases it has made what was once considered impossible, now possible. We are keen to collaborate with anyone who could potentially benefit from this enabling power and to explore the possibilities.
