The UK government plans to invest $273 million to create its most powerful supercomputer to date, named Isambard-AI.
Upon activation, it is poised to secure a place among the world’s most powerful AI supercomputers. With a multitude of Nvidia superchips at its core, Isambard-AI will be capable of executing over 200 quadrillion calculations per second. It is expected to come to life in the summer of 2024 at the University of Bristol.
This supercomputer will be built with the aid of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HP), which is famous for its laptops. It will be powered by over 5000 Nvidia’s GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, which will allow it to achieve more than 21 exaflops of AI performance. This is equivalent to more than 21 quintillion floating-point operations per second, specifically for AI tasks such as training large language models.
The University of Bristol claims that this level of performance will make Isambard AI 10 times faster than the UK’s current fastest AI supercomputer. The computer will be housed in a self-cooled, self-contained data center at Bristol’s National Composites Center.
But that’s not all. Isambard AI will also be able to connect with other supercomputers in the UK to further increase its performance. Simon McIntosh-Smith of the University of Bristol says that this will make the supercomputer “one of the most powerful AI systems for open science anywhere” once it’s up and running.
News about this supercomputer came out at the UK’s AI Safety Summit which was attended by leaders from different countries around the world including the US. The meeting was called to discuss the potential risks of AI and how to address them.
