A supercomputer heralded as having the potential to drive breakthroughs in fields such as robotics, big data, AI safety, climate research, and drug discovery has gone online.
Manufacturer Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) said that it delivered the system, known as Isambard-AI, in record time – with only three months between concept design and the system going live.
HPE’s Isambard-AI, located at UK’s University of Bristol, powered up this morning following a £225m investment from the UK government, first announced last Autumn.
According to HPE one of its first users will be the UK’s AI Safety Institute which will be looking at its capabilities for AI research from this month. As well as playing an essential role in AI safety it is hoped that the supercomputer will accelerate automated drug discovery and climate research.
Using direct liquid cooling solutions with highly integrated, heterogeneous CPU-GPU systems from NVIDIA, HPE also claims the supercomputer is one of the most efficient ever to have been built, and the most sustainable in the UK.
The Isambard-AI phase one was also ranked 129 in the latest edition of the TOP500 list of high-performance computing systems on Earth, as published at the ISC High Performance 2024 event in Hamburg, Germany.
Computing power
Placing its lightening-fast calculation capabilities into context, Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, director of the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing, explained:
“Assuming there are eight billion people on earth, and everyone performed one calculation per second, it would take 2.3 years for all eight billion people, working 24/7, 365-days a year, to do what Isambard-AI phase one could do in one second.”
McIntosh Smith added that when the remaining 5,280 GPUs arrive at the University’s National Composites Centre (NCC) later in the summer, it will increase the performance “by a factor of 32.”
Matt Harris, managing director for UK, Ireland, Middle East and Africa at HPE said that it was “exciting to see Isambard-AI enter the first stage of its journey to deliver Europe’s largest AI system for open science and propel the UK as a global leader in AI.”
He added: “This unique supercomputer is the centrepiece of the UK government’s AI Research Resource and will enable organisations like the AI Safety Institute to train generative AI models at scale with research outcomes expected as soon as May this year.”
The Isambard-AI project is being led by Bristol experts Professor McIntosh-Smith and Dr Sadaf Alam, with their team at the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS).
