Education and research institution north of the border operates a supercomputer facility that has previously been used to support the exploration of various use cases for large language model systems

The University of Edinburgh has launched a supercomputing cluster installed with what the institution claims is the largest ever computer chip dedicated to artificial intelligence.

Operated by the EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the university and part of the Edinburgh International Data Facility, the cluster is made up of four Cerebras CS-3, third generation wafer scale engine processors.

With the new service, the supercomputing centre will reportedly be able to train models of up to one trillion parameters, and fine tune 70 million models in a day. Parameters are internal variables that an AI model adjusts during training to improve its ability to make accurate predictions, meaning that those with higher parameters can perform better at complex tasks.

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The cluster will also allow the centre to continue its AI research into parallelism – a process that divides large compute tasks into smaller ones that multiple processors can solve simultaneously.

The university also claimed that the technology will allow for scientists and machine learning practitioners from other disciplines, not only computer science, to start building, training and using models with no need for complex parallel programming. The new service is part of the AI offering provided to the Edinburgh & South East Scotland City Region Deal as part of the Data Driven Innovation programme, which the university has led since 2018.

Professor Mark Parsons, EPCC director, said: “AI is transforming all of our lives, and this investment will help universities, public sector organisations, and companies – large and small – to train and use AI models at speeds and with ease no other AI technologies can match.”

The EPCC systems have previously helped researchers in India to develop a large language model for materials science and, in Switzerland, to adapt LLMs to better support Swiss German dialects.

A version of this story originally appeared on PublicTechnology sister publication Holyrood