Dear All, There are two items to which I wanted to draw your attention. I was just going to send this to the departmental computing list but because of the short notice that the first item requires I decided to send it to the academic staff list as well. If you are going to reply to the first item then please do work with the members of the computing committee from your community. For this we need (rough) replies by the end of the week. ###################################################################### Item 1 -------- A proposal was put to UMB before Christmas for an AI facility to be funded over several years. With an initial investment of £3M, increasing in subsequent years. The proposal initially came from DoC but UMB only agreed to it (and only the first phase initially) on the basis it was open to all of college. The plan is for the resource to be available by late summer 2025. This resource is to be used for both research and teaching. A group has been set up to determine what this will resource will look like. This includes the hardware, the software stack and the operating model. This group met for the first time last Friday and after some discussion decided that while we had the use cases from DoC we didn't know if these were suitable for the rest of the college. Given the short time scale it is unlikely that we will choose anything exotic this year and will probably stick to something like nvidia H200 GPUs - unless somebody puts forward a good reason to be more diverse. So I am trying to gather use cases from physics and the rest of FoNS by the next meeting - which is a week on Friday. These don't need to be polished at this stage, but if you can supply as much technical detail as possible it will be very helpful - for example one person I was chatting to said that there application was dramatically sped up by use of GPUs (which they use at other sites), but that it still doesn't use much of the GPU - which is interesting as the H200 can be divided up into different sized sub units. In order to gather everything together by the end of next week across FoNS I would be grateful if we could have drafts from physics by roughly the end of this week so that we can combine with others next week. So the sort of information that I would need would be: - The title of the application - whether it be research or teaching - A brief description: "Tau lepton ID at the LHC" or "LLMs for second year lab" or "MCMC for limit setting code" etc etc - The scale of the resources that you would like to use if it were to be available. - If you have any hardware preferences or information about scaling with hardware. - Any pieces of the software stack that you would deem essential or really useful. This can be as simple as "we need pytorch" or "we teach using jupyter-notebooks" to detailed OS considerations. - Any thoughts on the best operating model that would suite you. Again these can be simple such as "we need a little interactive time followed by very long (2 week) batch jobs" or "we need interactive access for teaching classes 3 times a week in the first term" to much more detailed answers if they apply to you. As I say, please do work with the member of the computing committee in your team and get (rough) drafts to me by the end of the week. ##################################################################### Item 2 -------- On a similar note I would like to draw your attention to the AIRR expressions of interest call that has just come out (end of last week). This is for access to the large scale national AI resources at Isambard-AI and Dawn Compute service. The call can be found at: https://engagementhub.ukri.org/ukri-infrastructure/airr-eoi/ If people are putting EoIs then I would be grateful if they kept me informed - I will help where I can. ######################################################################## Best, david