DERI is based in Empire House, Whitechapel and offers unrivalled views across the city.
The building has a post-modern feel with the services exposed. It is a light and airy space that provides a great place for our staff to work and collaborate.
The four floors have specifically designed office spaces, with two light wells that bring daylight into the basement.
The basement houses a main meeting hub area with a large kitchen and social area along with four meeting rooms and three smaller pods, as well as a soft area for impromptu coffee meetings. A secure bike park and showers are also located on this floor.
The three remaining floors have open plan office spaces with numerous lockers. Each floor is also kitted out with bookable meeting hubs, kitchens and individual coffee spots.
In early 2021, DERI and Queen Mary’s William Harvey Research Institute were awarded £1 million Research Capital Infrastructure Funding to create a high-performance computing (HPC) facility.
This will include 64 NVIDIA A100 GPUs for deep learning workloads and we are performing test runs in summer 2021.
The new HPC infrastructure at Queen Mary aims to support research across the University, and will be located at the University’s data centre in Slough. Access to the facility is managed by DERI.
Empire House was designed in the Art Deco style in the 1930s. The building’s restoration began in 2017 and is a wonderful addition to the regeneration of the local area.
Following years of neglect the building was in a dilapidated state, with a leaking roof that had led to water damage throughout all of the floors. The sympathetic renovation held on to many original features while adding modern attributes to the structure.
The building’s original architect, Hume Victor Kerr, was responsible for a number of Deco buildings in the area. Queen Mary are proud to give this one a new lease of life, bringing it up to date with the digital environment of the 21st century.