Driving Innovation with AI and High-Performance Computing

Thanks to Sam Paice, CEO at CFMS, for this guest blog on how advanced technologies are driving innovation to tackle global challenges.

As a society, we face a whole new range of challenges we’ve never faced before. Climate change, the energy crisis, rising population, resource depletion, changing disease patterns are all significant issues that require innovation beyond possibility. Until now, progress has been slow, stunted by a lack of technology and adoption that can support this innovation. We’re changing that. 

By harnessing cutting-edge technologies, we design, model and analyse hyper-complex problems, turning unique, extraordinary visions into exciting realities. CFMS offers modelling, simulation and high performance compute along with technical expertise to enable innovation and possibilities, unlimited. 

We are seeing a greater need to utilise digital technologies to accurately predict how hyper-complex systems behave, explore new design concepts and de-risk innovation adoption. Leveraging these technologies and powering them with industrially trusted high performance compute enables organisations to ‘fail fast’ and quickly iterate, driving progress. In a world where the issues we are facing are more pressing than ever that need to be solved faster than ever, this is critical. 

To enable us to support industries in advancing further, we’ve recently received £2.4 million from the UK Department of Science, Innovation and Technology’s Research and Innovation Organisations (RIO) Infrastructure fund to develop a unique, adaptable AI-enabled High Performance Computing system. This investment supports advanced research in technologies like multi-physics simulation, optimisation and AI/ML which are key to addressing global challenges. 

We’re excited to bring a flexible data centre architecture to Bristol to empower bold innovation. These technologies can be utilised to accelerate product development, widen design space exploration and reduce costly prototyping practices. This capability brings research-level compute with industry level security required for industrial research that relies on proprietary data. 

The modular HPC facility will offer secure, flexible compute for industry, allowing us to regularly update and optimise the hardware. As new technologies emerge or requirements change, we can adapt quickly to continue the pace of innovation. This system has been collaboratively architected by our teams in Engineering Computing Services, Model-Based Engineering, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, with input from our customers. Optimised for actual industry applications, we have the expertise to support the set-up and running of any work utilising high throughput, AI or HPC workloads. 

Innovation is more than just technology. A range of factors are involved with our societal ability to adopt innovation. Communication is a critical tool. We’re seeing hesitance in the adoption of these technologies due to a lack of knowledge and understanding of their value. Perhaps a lack of openness and a fear of change is a barrier to adoption. CFMS are open, honest and embrace change in the value and capabilities of these digital tools. We should be celebrating their potential, sharing successful use cases with quantifiable outcomes and their applicability to other sectors. Likewise, we should be forward in sharing the less successful applications and the learnings to ensure we continue to learn and evolve. 

There is significant strength in innovation hubs across Bristol and the South West in developing cutting-edge technology applications and talent designed to boost productivity and accelerate progress. We want to champion change, grow talent and drive the adoption of these tools to ensure the South West and the UK as a whole lead in innovation, positive market disruption, and much-needed productivity improvements.

Want to find out more? Contact us today to discuss how we can support your digital innovation.