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SOSCIP and AIP Announce Agreement
Mon, Jun 7, 2021 7:00 PM GMT
SOSCIP (Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform) and AI Partnerships Corporation are pleased to announce that they have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding. Launched in 2012, SOSCIP is Canada’s leading research and development (R&D) consortium harnessing Advanced Research Computing to drive industry innovation. Developed as a collaboration between Ontario post-secondary institutions and many small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as well as large companies across the province, SOSCIP has catalyzed the creation of a collaborative ecosystem that has accelerated economic impact, job creation, skills retention, and the growth of Ontario-based firms. SOSCIP works together with its partners such as IBM and the university and college community in Ontario to drive the adoption of AI and data science solutions and enable the development of a knowledge-based and innovative economy in Ontario by supporting technical skill development and delivering high-quality outcomes. SOSCIP is administered by the University of Toronto which is an AI/ML powerhouse and home to Professor Geoff Hinton who is acknowledged as the father of AI.
Since its inception, SOSCIP has catalyzed the creation of a collaborative ecosystem that has accelerated the impact and growth of over 135 Canadian firms through more than $130M in R&D investments. The unique computing platforms and services provided by SOSCIP allow companies to accelerate the development of new products & services, improve business processes, drive sales and create new jobs, resulting in increased impact on the Ontario, Canadian and global economies.
The SOSCIP advanced computing platforms feature three distinct and unique systems that provide academic and industry researchers with a competitive advantage not available anywhere else in Canada. The feature compute facility is the new SOSCIP GPU-Accelerated Platform that delivers the fastest performance on a wide variety of GPU computing applications. It is a high-performance GPU cluster based on IBM Power System AC922 powered by NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and IBM Power9 CPUs.
The systems have NVLink 2.0 technology to accelerate computing by allowing for greater speed, programmability, and accessibility of data.
- 148 GPU-equivalent allocation on SOSCIP-SciNet cluster Mist
- 54 IBM AC922 servers each with 2×16 core Power9 GPU and 256GB RAM
- Each compute node has 4 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs with 32GB of RAM and CUDA capability 7.0 (Volta),
- GPUs are connected to the Power9 CPUs via NVLink.
- The OS is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for Power9 (Little Endian)
The agreement addresses the mutual interest and desire of SOSCIP and AIP to collaborate on the commercialization of IP developed by the companies using SOSCIP resources, bringing together other industry leaders, academic researchers, computing facilities, and data management services to support innovation.
The overarching goals of the collaboration are:
- AIP to provide industry input as to AI/ML oriented projects that SOSCIP has supported is supporting or is considering supporting as it relates to product market demand, competitive positioning, and access to sales and marketing channels
- AIP may provide sales and marketing to qualified companies through AIP and its international affiliate network
- Expand the commercialization focused support and services that SOSCIP can make available to the companies that it supports
- Provide SOSCIP resources to AIP and its affiliates that qualify for such support
“The specific objectives for AIP are to provide SOSCIP and the companies that it supports with additional commercialization capability that may lead to the companies having a higher degree of success in the market, potentially as AIP affiliates or by engaging with the AIP affiliate network” commented Dr. Tom Corr the CEO of AIP.
“SOSCIP believes that it will gain from its relationship with AIP by providing incremental commercialization feedback on market demand for the technologies that SOSCIP applicant companies are looking to develop, attract additional company and stakeholder interest due to the relationship with AIP, and enhance company chances of world-wide success as a result of the feedback and additional marketing capability that this relationship with AIP will provide" said Dr. Tibor Turi the Executive Director of SOSCIP.
- AIP Team