Kao Data hosts InstaDeep's compute capabilities

To expand its research and development, InstaDeep was looking for a specialist HPC-Ready data centre capable of hosting their NVIDIA powered supercomputers.

  • Friday, 29th January 2021 Posted 3 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Kao Data has won a customer contract with InstaDeep, a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) powered decision-making solutions for enterprise. The new high performance computing (HPC) installation at Kao Data’s Harlow campus allows InstaDeep to expand its research and development capabilities. Deployment of this sophisticated technical platform reinforces InstaDeep’s position as one of Europe’s preeminent providers of decision-making processes for real-life industrial environments.


Recently selected by CB Insights as one of the 100 most promising AI start-ups in the world, InstaDeep, a high-growth, AI scale-up, utilises its significant expertise within GPU-powered computing, machine learning and reinforcement learning to build products such as its unique DeepChain™ technology - a cloud-native protein design platform which allows the discovery of new protein designs validated with molecular dynamics simulations without human interaction. Today InstaDeep’s global reach includes a strategic collaboration with BioNTech on the discovery and development of novel immunotherapies, collaboration with Total on 3D microfossil image detection, segmentation and classification, and development of a train capacity and traffic management system for Deutsche Bahn.

InstaDeep’s supercomputer includes AMD EPYC (Milan) powered hardware, supported with the latest generation NVIDIA DGX A100 GPUs, Mellanox switches and a Ceph distributed storage system. It is specifically configured to allow all compute nodes (CPUs and GPUs) access to the storage cluster, optimising performance and accelerating the reinforcement learning process. Given the advanced computing footprint InstaDeep will be operating and the massive datasets they will be utilising, choosing an industrial scale data centre that specialised in hosting HPC and NVIDIA GPUs was crucial.

After reviewing a number of providers, Kao Data was chosen because of the data centre’s technical excellence within HPC and AI, the specialist support from Kao Data’s team, and the ability for InstaDeep to bespoke build and host their cluster within 28kW adjacent and contiguous racks in a dedicated Technology Suite. In addition, Kao Data’s Megaport-enabled campus is engineered to be ultra-efficient and sustainable, meaning InstaDeep could benefit from competitive pricing and 100% certified, renewable power.

“InstaDeep is an EMEA leader in decision-making AI, 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 data centre that offers world-class infrastructure, specialist HPC support and the scalability to help us to grow our industry-leading AI product platforms and solutions.”

“Kao Data is delighted to welcome InstaDeep as our first new client of 2021,” said Lee Myall, Chief Executive Officer at Kao Data. “Like ourselves, they 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.”