Computational Requirements

[Jez-Carter]

💻 One goal of the toolbox is to make methods easily reproducible/runnable. A major barrier to this is often computational requirements, e.g. code writen to run on a specific supercomputer or GPU etc. As part of addressing this issue, quarterly meetings have been set up between NC-UK representatives and IT, to discuss computational needs of methods. I'm looking for feedback on specific computational requirements of methods either current or anticipated so I can raise these with IT and the infrastructure can be developed to reduce the computational barrier of methods in the toolbox.

[Jez-Carter]

NC-UK & IT Meeting 03/03/2025:

• There's a need to coordinate computational requirements across major projects, such as NC-UK and FDRI.
• Expanding internal infrastructure will take place alongside expanding external 'private' cloud resource availability.
• Code should be made 'cloud native/ready' so it can make use of both external and internal computational resource availability.
• Current work on LLMs requires GPU access, which is currently being provided through an AWS trial tenancy.
• There's a need for IT to provide information around timelines associated to different resource aquirement.
• NC-UK has a capital spend requirement by March 2026, current thoughts are around aquiring further 'private' cloud resources.