What is it?

The Data Centre hosts the Reality Emulator’s compute, data, immersive and advanced network hardware platforms, services and applications.  Two Communication Rooms provide connections to our local autonomous research network and to the wider University campus and beyond. Both the Data Centre and Communication Rooms have approximately 30-40 per cent headroom for future expansion. These are the focal point of the Data Yard adjacent to our main BDFI building at 65 Avon Street. Visitors will be able to see into the inside of Data Centre through a viewing window.

Why is it special?

The Data Centre provides significant compute and storage facilities, with a 5G and ultra-low latency optical network infrastructure. It will be connected to regional testbeds and a national dark fibre network, thus extending its capability and providing access to a wider audience of researchers, collaborators and partners. The solution provides BDFI with a local private cloud  allowing us to grant private research “tenancies” for experimentation that are entirely isolated from each other.

As well as a significant amount of central unit processing, the Data Centre will also provide a large number of cutting-edge graphics processing units and field programmable gate arrays, providing graphics substantial processing power and superior performance in deep learning applications where low latency is critical. This will allow the Reality Emulator to run advanced digital twinning and reality models for users in realtime.

In addition BDFI, together with the Smart Internet Lab, will provide a key performance indicator measuring solution allowing users to make interventions and measure the performance gain or penalty of the underlying Data Centre services.

How does it work?

The Data Centre is currently fitted with 14 racks, with room for four more. Ten racks support the Reality Emulator and four racks for will support the Instrumented Auditorium and Production Studio, which form part of the BDFI-affiliated MyWorld programme. These racks, including power, are designed to  enable the provision of hyper dense compute and storage services.

The Data Centre and Communication rooms support the latest standards in high availability. All services and distribution paths are redundant, including redundant power supplies and generator. The Data Centre also has an all fibre backbone, allowing for exceptional high data throughputs and low latency.

All aspects of the Data Centre service will use open standards, allowing researchers and partners to bring in existing solutions and take advantage of the scale of compute and network resources the Reality Emulator will supply.

The Data Centre has a remotely managed monitoring solution, with over sensors within the Data Centre monitoring cooling performance, availability, power usage, battery backup, early waring fire and smoke detectors, water leakage, humidity and an overall temperature map. The racks are all water cooled, and the heat gained by the water-cooling system will be extracted via a heat exchange and used to heat the buildings. BDFI’s Net Zero £2.5m grant-funded programme will in addition provide the Data Centre with an experimental energy-management system, with which we will be able to investigate strategies to reduce its power consumption.  

What difference might it make?

It is the openness and power of the Reality Emulator Data Centre’s platforms, services, network connectivity and artificial-intelligence capability that makes possible the flexibility and reconfigurability required to deliver impressive and iterative emulation experiences. This is what makes it so much more than a conventional digital twin and provides an unrivalled facility to drive digital innovation on an unprecedented scale.

The Net Zero artificial-intelligence-driven Data Centre energy management system will also allow us to investigate strategies to reduce the energy consumption of the Reality Emulator Datacentre. The use of sensors and our ability to analyse vast amounts of data will allow for quick, automated decisions on those parts of the system that can be put into sleep mode, shut down or turned on again.

The Data Centre is in itself also an experimental platform, meaning researchers and partners will be able to bring along experimental hardware and perform experiments. The network infrastructure will allow for cutting edge network research, such as using Quantum Key Distribution and even adding neuromorphic devices into the fabric.

Get involved

Want to talk to us about how you might use the Reality Emulator, get involved in pilot work or net zero projects, or use the experimental aspects of the Datacentre itself? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch at bdfi-enquiries@bristol.ac.uk