Edinburgh to house Europe’s first regional data innovation centre – Business Insider

Posted on August 2, 2020 by Design in Design Innovation | 0 Comments

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The University of Edinburgh will team up with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to build Europe’s first regional data innovation centre.

The Edinburgh International Data Facility will play a critical role in the city’s Data Driven Innovation program to drive greater collaboration between industry, the public sector and academia to deliver benefits from the data economy.

The deal to develop the facility is expected to cost more than $125 million over 10 years, with the long-term vision to establish Edinburgh as Europe’s data capital.

It will look to enable R&D on initiatives focused on addressing global issues such as food production, climate change, space exploration and genetically-tailored healthcare, as well as enabling researchers access to high-performance computing and AI technologies to apply analytics to modeling and simulation to increase accuracy of results and speed time-to-discovery.

Speaking on the project, Mark Parsons, director of EPCC at the University of Edinburgh, said: “We are pleased to be working with HPE to deliver what we believe is the only facility of its kind in Europe focused specifically on data-driven regional growth.

“With the Edinburgh International Data Facility, we are combining computing and data resources to create a facility that will allow organizations to use data to innovate throughout their organizations. HPE is uniquely positioned to provide the spectrum of infrastructure and services, as well as the flexibility that this project demands.”

Lee Rand, Director of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at HPE EMEA, added: “HPE is proud to embark on this long-term initiative with the University of Edinburgh, following a highly competitive tender process.”

“We were chosen due to the flexibility and reliability offered through our end-to-end solutions portfolio, and because we were one of the very few organizations able to seamlessly combine all of the Edinburgh International Data Facility’s requirements into a single framework. In the data-centric era deriving insights and value from across multiple datasets will be a key to success for business and government alike. We look forward to boosting the UK’s capacity for data-driven innovation through this initiative.”