- University of Bristol awarded £225m of a £300m overall
Government investment to make the UK a world leader in AI with new
Isambard-AI supercomputer
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has been named as the supplier
to deliver next-generation supercomputing technologies and is due
to deliver Isambard-AI at the National Composites Centre in Bristol
next summer
- The new system will be UK’s most powerful supercomputer, with
over 5,000 state-of-the-art NVIDIA GH200 superchips, capable of an
incredible 200 quadrillion calculations per second
- Isambard-AI will offer computing capacity never seen before in
the UK for researchers and industry to make AI-driven breakthroughs
in fields such as robotics, big data, climate research, and drug
discovery
As part of the UK Government’s investment in a national AI
Research Resource, The University of Bristol and Hewlett Packard
Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced that HPE has been selected
to deliver the UK’s fastest supercomputer thanks to £225m of
Government funding.
The funding injection, part of a £300m package to create a new
national Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (AIRR) for the
country announced at the government’s AI Safety Summit at Bletchley
Park, will make the UK a world leader in AI.
To be known as Isambard-AI, it will be 10 times more powerful
than the UK’s current fastest supercomputer and among the most
powerful in the world when it opens at the National Composites
Centre (NCC) in the summer of 2024.
Isambard-AI will be designed with cutting-edge technologies
to drive AI-driven research
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) will build and deliver the new
system with the next generation HPE Cray EX supercomputers and over
5,000 state-of-the-art NVIDIA GH200 superchips. The advanced
technologies and design will allow Isambard-AI to reach up to 200
quadrillion calculations per second.
The new Bristol facility will be used by a wide range of
organisations from across the UK to harness the power of AI, which
is already the main driver of emerging technologies such as
training large language models (LLMs), big data and robotics. The
new supercomputing facility will also play a vital role in
important areas such as accelerating automated drug discovery and
climate research.
Isambard-AI will connect with a new supercomputer cluster at the
University of Cambridge, called Dawn, which is being developed to
offer additional capacity as part of the new national AIRR.
Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, Director of the Isambard
National Research Facility at the University of Bristol, said:
“Isambard-AI represents a huge leap forward for AI computational
power in the UK. Today Isambard-AI would rank within the top 10
fastest supercomputers in the world and, when in operation later in
2024, it will be one of the most powerful AI systems for open
science anywhere.
“It’s immensely exciting to be at the forefront of the AI
revolution and to partner with industry leaders HPE and NVIDIA to
rapidly build and deploy large-scale research computing
infrastructure to create one of the most powerful supercomputers in
the world. Isambard-AI will offer capacity never seen before in the
UK for researchers and industry to harness the huge potential of AI
in fields such as robotics, big data, climate research and drug
discovery.”
Justin Hotard, executive vice president and general manager,
HPC, AI & Labs at HPE said: "Today's announcement of the UK’s
major investment in AI supercomputing underscores its commitment to
taking a global leadership position in AI. The Isambard-AI system
will harness world-leading supercomputing, including
high-performance networking co-developed at HPE's Bristol labs, to
provide the performance and scale required for compute-intensive AI
projects. We are proud to partner with the UK Government and the
University of Bristol to give UK researchers and industry access to
Europe's largest AI system for open science."
Ian Buck, vice president of hyperscale and HPC at NVIDIA, said:
“In building one of the world's fastest AI supercomputers, the UK
is demonstrating the importance for nations to create their own
infrastructure. Isambard-AI will provide researchers with the same
state-of-the-art AI and HPC compute resources used by the world's
leading AI pioneers, enabling the UK to introduce the next wave of
AI and scientific breakthroughs.”
The Government’s new Frontier AI Taskforce will have priority
access to support its work to mitigate the risks posed by the most
advanced forms of AI, including national security from the
development of bioweapons and cyberattacks. The resource will also
support the work of the AI Safety Institute, as it develops a
programme of research looking at the safety of frontier AI models
and supports government policy with this analysis.
Michelle Donelan, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and
Technology said: “Frontier AI models are becoming exponentially
more powerful. At our AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, we have
made it clear that Britain is grasping the opportunity to lead the
world in adopting this technology safely so we can put it to work
and lead healthier, easier and longer lives.
“This means giving Britain’s leading researchers and scientific
talent access to the tools they need to delve into how this
complicated technology works. That is why we are investing in
building UK’s supercomputers, making sure we cement our place as a
world-leader in AI safety.”
Notes to editors
Isambard-AI will be built using the HPE Cray EX supercomputer, a
next-generation platform architected to support unprecedented
performance and scale, and consist of 5,448 NVIDIA GH200 Grace
Hopper Superchips which combine NVIDIA’s Arm-based Grace CPU with a
Hopper-based GPU optimized for power efficiency and giant-scale AI,
along with the latest HPE Slingshot 11 interconnect, and nearly 25
petabytes of storage using the Cray Clusterstor E1000 optimised for
AI workflows.
When in production, Isambard-AI will achieve well over 200
PetaFLOP/s using the Top500’s Linpack benchmark, while also
achieving over 21 ExaFLOP/s of AI performance to accelerate AI
training for large-scale AI, such as large language models.
This represents a massive 10 times improvement over the next
fastest system in the UK when Isambard-AI is live, and will enable
Isambard-AI to perform over 21 quintillion AI-optimised floating
point operations per second (i.e. 1.3 billion billion).
Isambard-AI will also feature sophisticated direct
liquid-cooling capabilities as part of the HPE Cray EX
supercomputer design to improve energy efficiency and overall
carbon footprint impact. The system will be hosted in a
self-cooled, self-contained data center, using the HPE Performance
Optimized Data Center (POD), and will be situated at the National
Composites Centre (NCC), based at the Bristol and Bath Science
Park. NCC is one of seven research centres across the UK that form
the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, helping to turn great ideas
into reality by providing access to world-class research and
development facilities and expertise that would otherwise be out of
reach for many businesses in the UK.
HPE is also collaborating with the University of Bristol on a
highly-energy efficient heat re-use model, extracting waste heat
from the Isambard-AI system to use as renewable energy to heat
local buildings, supporting the Net Zero carbon efficiency targets
for 2030/2040 as mandated by the UK Government.
Bristol is one of the top UK universities for AI research and
scientific computing. It already plays host to cutting-edge
computing technology, including the previously announced Isambard 3
supercomputer, while being home to the UKRI Centre for Doctoral
Training in Interactive Artificial Intelligence and the newly
announced UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Practice-Oriented
Artificial Intelligence.
About Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) is the global
edge-to-cloud company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes
by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. Built on
decades of reimagining the future and innovating to advance the way
people live and work, HPE delivers unique, open and intelligent
technology solutions as a service. With offerings spanning Cloud
Services, Compute, High Performance Computing & AI, Intelligent
Edge, Software, and Storage, HPE provides a consistent experience
across all clouds and edges, helping customers develop new business
models, engage in new ways, and increase operational performance.
For more information, visit: www.hpe.com.
About the University of Bristol
The University is ranked within the top 10 universities in the
UK and 55th in the world (QS World University Rankings 2024); it is
also ranked among the top five institutions in the UK for its
research, according to analysis of the Research Excellence
Framework (REF) 2021; and is the 4th most targeted university by
top UK employers.
The University was founded in 1876 and was granted its Royal
Charter in 1909. It was the first university in England to admit
women on the same basis as men.
The University is a major force in the economic, social and
cultural life of Bristol and the region, but is also a significant
player on the world stage. It has over 20,000 undergraduates and
over 7,000 postgraduate students from more than 150 countries, and
its research links span the globe.
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231101193684/en/
Alastair McCormick Alastair.mccormick@hpe.com
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:HPE)
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