Sparking Collaboration

Academic-industry collaboration strengthens research and development initiatives

Collaboration between industry and academia promotes technological advancement and innovation. As we move into the next decade of innovative technologies, AI and HPC working together will bring about significant changes across industries.

TACC has always supported industry research and development by providing supercomputing time, advanced computing expertise, visualization resources, and one-on-one training, building strong relationships that result in enhanced R&D programs for companies.

Founded in 2014, start-up SparkCognition delivers AI solutions to help their customers predict future outcomes, optimize processes, and prevent workplace injuries. They work with a wide range of global businesses and industries from manufacturing and energy to aerospace and defense.

SparkCognition’s collaboration with UT Austin has always been strong; thus, the partnership that quickly developed with TACC was a natural one.

“We appreciate the flexibility of the relationship and the interactions we have with TACC,” said Dimitri Voytan, senior data scientist at SparkCognition. “Our work involves physics, machine learning, and a huge amount of data. We’re grateful to work with TACC experts on a variety of computational problems.”

SparkCognition relies on its partnership with TACC to help its customers maintain an edge in rapidly growing markets. For example, AI in the energy market is expected to reach a market size of $20.83B at a steady compound annual growth rate of 23.6% in 2028, according to Emergen Research.

When SparkCognition started working with a global energy company to help them in the exploration of oil and gas reservoirs, the company’s leadership knew TACC could supplement their in-house HPC resources.

“HPC is needed to implement physics and learning based algorithms,” Voytan said. “If you did not have these resources solutions to these problems would take months to years to implement. Having access to the advanced computing resources and expertise at TACC is fundamental to implement any of our physics-based and machine learning algorithms.”

TACC helps SparkCognition with a variety of advanced computing challenges from training algorithms to writing physics-based engines to downloading terabytes of data.

“Our relationship with TACC allows us to achieve results and test for a variety of ideas,” Voytan concluded.