£313m deal will expand hi-tech centre at Daresbury

UNIVERSITIES and Science Minister Jo Johnson has unveiled a £313 million partnership with information technology leader IBM, expanding the Hartree Centre at Daresbury, near Warrington.
Following on from Government’s £113 million commitment in the Autumn Statement to expand the Hartree Centre over the next five years, IBM will further support the project with a package of technology and onsite expertise worth up to £200 million.
IBM’s contributions will include:
•Access to the latest data-centric and cognitive computing technologies, including its world-class ‘Watson’ cognitive computing platform
•At least 24 IBM researchers to be based at the Hartree Centre to work side-by-side with existing researchers
•Joint commercialisation of intellectual property assets produced in partnership with the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), which runs the Hartree Centre.
Jo Johnson said: “We live in an information economy – from the smart devices we use every day to the super-computers that helped find the Higgs Boson, the power of advanced computing means we now have access to vast amounts of data.
“This partnership with IBM, which builds on our £113 million investment to expand the Hartree Centre, will help businesses make the best use of Big Data to develop better products and services that will boost productivity, drive growth and create jobs.”
David Stokes, chief executive for IBM in the UK and Ireland, said:
“We’re at the dawn of a new era of cognitive computing, during which advanced data-centric computing models and open innovation approaches will allow technology to greatly augment decision-making capabilities for business and government.
“The expansion of our collaboration with STFC builds upon Hartree’s successful engagement with industry and its record in commercialising technological developments, and provides a world-class environment using Watson and OpenPOWER technologies to extend the boundaries of Big Data and cognitive computing.”
The Hartree Centre will directly benefit from breakthrough innovations rapidly emerging from the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community backed by IBM, NVIDIA, Mellanox and more than 100 other organisations worldwide. The research programme will leverage OpenPOWER high performance computing innovations to enable complex analytics on massive amounts of data.
The Hartree Centre is already helping businesses like Unilever and Glaxo SmithKline use high performance computing to improve the stability of home products such as fabric softeners and to pinpoint links between genes and diseases.
Professor John Womersley, chief executive of STFC, said: “Data intensive techniques are transforming every discipline of science, and connecting these capabilities to the needs of industry has the potential to revolutionise every business sector.
“The Government’s five-year investment in the Hartree Centre will deliver a step-change in capability in this area, and will bring in significant knowledge and expertise from IBM Research that will help ensure our science and industry remains at the very forefront of research and development.”
More than two dozen IBM researchers will be based at the Hartree Centre at Sci-Tech Daresbury, and will work side-by-side with the centre’s researchers to develop new tools, algorithms and approaches to Big Data that will help UK industry and commerce take greater advantage of the wealth of insights hidden in that data.