We’ve funded a range of projects to guide our roadmap for the future

Federated AI application container platform / registry feasibility study

We are undertaking a study with input from the community via workshops and a survey of the feasibility of a container service for the UK AI research community.

We propose a comprehensive feasibility study and requirements gathering exercise to inform the potential development of a National Federated Compute Service (NFCS) platform or registry for AI application containers. The goal is to understand the community needs and technical viability of a service that simplifies access to AI tools (like TensorFlow, PyTorch) optimised for various hardware, including different CPU architectures (x86, ARM) and accelerators akin to a hardware-agnostic, federated version of vendor-specific cloud registries.

The project will engage extensively with the UK research community through workshops, and discussions to map current practices for a potential federated container service.