IC7 Facilities

Keele secured £14 million of infrastructure investments for a building, IC7 (Innovation Centre 7) that houses Keele's Digital Society Institute (DSI) and SMEs driving the digital revolution.

IC7 houses digital facilities ranging from a data centre hosting a green-energy-powered high-performance computer (HPC) cluster to state-of-the-art meeting rooms via a virtual reality room and a data-visualisation room. You can find out more about these facilities below.

Construction of IC7 completed in June 2023. The building comprises a suite of digital facilities: data centre, AR/VR room, data visualisation suite, workshop and training space and meeting rooms. You can find out more details about these facilities below.

DSI director Raphael Hirschi successfully lead the submission of a “FUNDING IN PLACES GRANT” grant application to the Wolfson foundation that secured £330,000 for the purchase of a £580,000 HPC facility. The HPC facility is named greenHPC as it is green-energy powered and it powers green-energy research. The solution delivered by HPE has a hybrid architecture mixing traditional CPUs with H100 and L40 GPUs, catering for a wide range of workloads.

It has a hybrid architecture that combines traditional CPUs (central processing units) with novel single and double-precision GPUs (graphics processing units).

You can apply for an account on greenHPC using the following application form.

greenHPC

greenHPC key technical specifications

Head/login node: 64 CPU-cores (2 x Xeon-G 6430 CPU, 32 cores 2.1 GHz); 2 x NVIDIA L40 48GB PCIe Accelerator; 128GB RAM (8 x 16GB 1Rx8 PC5-4800B-R)

11 L40 compute nodes: 64 Intel CPU cores (2 Xeon-G 6430 CPU, 32 cores 2.1 GHz); 4 NVIDIA L40 48GB PCIe Accelerator; 512GB RAM (16 x 32GB 2Rx8 PC5-4800B-R)

H100 compute node: 64 Intel CPU cores (2 Xeon-G 6430 CPU, 32 cores 2.1 GHz); 4 NVIDIA H100 80GB PCIe Accelerator with NVIDIA Ampere NVLink 2x2 Bridge; 1024GB RAM (16 x 64GB 2Rx4 PC5-4800B-R)

File server: 64 CPU-cores (2 x Xeon-G 6430 CPU, 32 cores 2.1 GHz); 128GB RAM (8 x 16GB 1Rx8 PC5-4800B-R); Storage: 100 TB (RAID6 using 15 x 7.68TB SATA RI SFF BC MV SSD)

Backup server: 64 CPU-cores (2 x Xeon-G 6430 CPU, 32 cores 2.1 GHz); 128GB RAM (8 x 16GB 1Rx8 PC5-4800B-R); Storage: 108 TB (RAID6 using 8 x 18TB SATA 7.2K LFF LP ISE MV HDD)

The Data Visualisation Room boasts three LED walls that can work either as a single unit (Full Res 11520 x 2160) or take (three: Left/Right Wall 3456 x 2160 & Centre Wall 4608 x 2160) separate feeds as you can see in the examples below. It provides a unique environment to develop software as well as analyse and discuss dataset. 

dva-1

dva-2

dva-3

The AR/VR room (IC70.003) is an energy and cost-effective system composed of 4 projectors covering three walls and the ground for an immersive experience. The system was supplied by Holospatial and is compatible with all Unity applications.

vr-room

The ground floor of IC7 offers a versatile space that can be used for conferences, workshops as well as training events. The total capacity of the ground is 160 people, up to 80 for conference-style event layout, 20-30 for workshops with “round-table” discussions and 10-20 for training events. The photos below shows the different areas.

Digilab 1

Digilab 2

Digilab 3

Digilab 4

 

The winter garden meeting room offers an uplifting environment for meetings with indoor plants, trees, a moss wall and expansive campus views from the first-floor windows. With two large screens and conferencing equipment, the space it is fully equipped for hybrid meetings.

Winter garden 1 Winter garden 2 Winter garden 3 Winter garden 4

DSI’s shared office space is on the left as you enter the building. Feel free to pop in and say hi next time you come to IC7.

office-1

office-2

The IC7 entrance atrium offers a convivial space for receptions. It has a LED projection wall with high resolution: 4224 (width) by 2376 (height). Presentations will display correctly and are scaled accordingly by the videowall controller.

Atrium 2 Atrium 1

ic7-1 ic7-2 ic7-3