Kao Data signs AI-focused life sciences startup InstaDeep as a customer

Harlow-based colocation provider Kao Data has added artificial intelligence (AI)-focused startup InstaDeep to its customer roster of high-performance computing (HPC) clients.

Founded in 2014, InstaDeep specialises in providing AI-based decision-making products for enterprises and industrial environments.

The company confirmed that it will use Kao Data’s colocation campus to house the HPC workloads that underpin its research and development activities.

Its HPC supercomputing environment consists of AMD EPYC-powered hardware combined with Nvidia DGX A100 graphics processing units (GPUs), Mellanox switches and a Ceph distributed storage system.

“This setup is specifically configured to allow all compute nodes (CPUs and GPUs) access to the storage cluster, optimising performance and accelerating the reinforcement learning process,” said Kao Data and InstaDeep in a joint statement.

InstaDeep said it chose to entrust Kao Data with its HPC cluster because it had capacity for it to be set up within 28kW adjacent and continuous racks inside its datacentre, and could ensure its workloads would be powered by 100% renewable energy.

“InstaDeep is a leader in decision-making AI [across Europe, the Middle East and Africa], hence it is key to deploy our supercomputing and AI hardware within a technically superior environment, capable of supporting the latest HPC and GPU-powered technologies,” said Karim Beguir, CEO and co-founder of InstaDeep.

“By working with Kao Data, we have found a datacentre that offers world-class infrastructure, specialist HPC support and the scalability to help us to grow our industry-leading AI product platforms and solutions.”

Since the first phase of its datacentre campus went live in 2018, Kao Data has set its sights on differentiating itself from the rest of the colocation market by modelling the design of its campus on how the hyperscale cloud giants build their facilities.

It has also made a concerted effort to court clients with compute-heavy HPC and AI workloads, and has previously gone public with its goal to become the colocation provider of choice for the life sciences community.

Securing InstaDeep as a reference customer is in keeping with that goal, as its flagship offering, DeepChain, is a cloud-native platform that is used to uncover new protein designs that can be validated using molecular dynamics simulations, and its technologies are also used in the development of novel immunotherapies.

Lee Myall, CEO of Kao Data, said: “Like ourselves, InstaDeep are a pioneering, high-tech organisation that are at the very forefront of their industry and their disruptive use of HPC and AI is enabling them to create tremendous competitive advantage for their customers. We look forward to supporting their efforts and helping their business to innovate and grow.”