ACIT Hub

Accelerated Compute is revolutionising many fields where the UK has strategic interests and comparative strength. The UK government and industry have invested over £1.8 billion in Accelerated Compute infrastructure with expected national economic benefits exceeding £23.7 billion by 2034.

As an essential part of the Accelerated Compute ecosystem, the Research Technology Professional (RTP) community have collectively contributed over £53.3 million value to the UKRI research activities by providing high standard services in infrastructure development, operation, and research support. But while the recognition of Research Software Engineers has improved significantly over the last decade, there is a chronic lack of support and nationwide coordination to develop the RTPs across the UK who build and maintain the Accelerated Compute platforms that underpin the AI and Big Data digital economy. The Accelerated Compute Infrastructure Training Hub (ACIT-Hub) draws on the experience of the Research Infrastructure Engineers (RIEs) across the successful UKRI Tier 2 JADE consortium, to address this gap in the knowledge sharing and skills development arena. The ACIT-Hub is hosted at Surrey, a driving force in AI through its Institute in People-Centred AI (PAI) and the Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP). Together these have a world-leading track record of providing training, guiding people to reach their potential and hosting compute infrastructure for Computer Vision for over 3 decades, with CVSSP currently ranked 1st in the UK for Computer Vision and 3rd for Computer Vision and AI. The ACIT-Hub will develop efficient and sustainable training solutions, to future proof the skills development of RTPs such as SysOps, Infrastructure Engineers, DevOps, System Administrators and Technical Support, who underpin large-scale Accelerated Compute.

By providing bespoke training courses and events covering accelerators, networking, storage, and orchestration and management software, highlighting both the fundamental and applied applications of the latest Accelerated Compute technologies, including when to ‘burst to cloud’. This comprehensive and agile training will be co-designed and developed by expert RTPs to ensure that it is relevant, and accessible to all.

The hub will offer translational training in essential skills and work with universities and existing accrediting bodies to provide a professionally recognised talent pool that can drive uptake, in research and industry, of efficient methodologies for deploying, maintaining and using accelerated compute infrastructure. The hub recognises the diversity of backgrounds present in the RIE community and it will reflect this across all training and CPD events.