UCD is unveiling its largest-ever investment in AI supercomputing, funded by the Higher Education Research Equipment Grant, with an additional €1.45 million allocated over the past year to upgrade existing clusters.

The university is launching Advanced UCD Research in Artificial Intelligence (AURA), a nearly €724,000 Nvidia DGX B200 system, to boost AI‑led research and broaden access to high-end compute for students and researchers.

The project aims to position UCD as Ireland’s leading university in AI and high‑performance computing, expanding capacity through AURA and upgraded clusters.

Researchers highlight practical applications, including Prof. Gerardine Meaney’s cultural analytics and Dr. Andrew Hines’ machine perception work, spanning analyses of large historical datasets to enhancements in consumer tech perception.

Quotes from researchers emphasize that tasks that once took a year on standard GPUs can now be completed in days with AURA, accelerating outputs across machine perception and historical data analysis.

AURA will support a broad spectrum of areas—from healthcare and cultural/political analysis to business and weather/climate modelling—and will be accessible to thousands of UCD students and researchers.

By enabling faster model training and greater research output, AURA is set to significantly advance research across fields like healthcare, cultural analysis, business, and climate science.

Thousands of UCD graduate students will gain hands‑on access to AURA, enhancing practical training and boosting their competitiveness in the job market.

The platform will be available to all UCD students for training models, providing a practicalEDGE in AI computation and career readiness.

AURA features eight Blackwell chips, delivering around threefold the training performance of the previous generation and roughly 50 times faster compute than UCD’s current SONIC cluster.

Delivery of the DGX B200 system, with eight Blackwell chips, is expected by early next year, marking a major upgrade in campus AI capacity.