The UK government has revealed a substantial $273 million investment to construct its most advanced supercomputer, Isambard-AI, which is poised to rank among the world’s top AI supercomputers upon activation. Powered by thousands of NVIDIA superchips, Isambard-AI will execute over 200 quadrillion calculations per second. This cutting-edge supercomputer is scheduled to commence operations in the summer of 2024 and will find its home at the University of Bristol.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is responsible for building this supercomputer, and it will harness 5,448 of NVIDIA’s GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, as confirmed by NVIDIA. Isambard-AI is anticipated to deliver more than 21 exaflops of AI performance, equivalent to over 21 quintillion floating-point operations per second for AI applications, particularly in training large language models. According to the University of Bristol, Isambard-AI will outpace the current fastest supercomputer in the UK by a factor of ten. It will be situated within a “self-cooled, self-contained data center” at Bristol’s National Composites Center.
This announcement was made during the UK’s AI Safety Summit, where leaders from various countries, including the US, are convening to deliberate on the future of AI and its associated risks. Isambard-AI is slated to integrate with other supercomputers in the UK to further enhance its performance. Once operational, as stated by Simon McIntosh-Smith of the University of Bristol, Isambard-AI will rank as “one of the most potent AI systems for open science globally.”
