UK government invests £225 million in supercomputer with 5,448 GH200 chips
The British government has committed to investing £225 million in the Isambard-AI supercomputer. According to the University of Bristol, where Isambard is housed, this will be the fastest supercomputer in the UK.
The machine is powered by 5448 Grace Hopper superchips from Nvidia, says the University of Bristol. These GH200 chips combine an H100 GPU with an Nvidia Grace CPU on a single module of approximately 200 billion transistors. Each Grace Hopper superchip has 72 Neoverse V2 CPU cores and 16,896 CUDA cores. This means that Isambard-AI will have a total of more than 392,000 CPU cores and more than 92 million CUDA cores. The system also has almost 25 petabytes of storage.
In addition, the supercomputer is said to achieve more than 200 petaflops of FP64 computing power based on the TOP500 Linpack benchmark. The system also offers 21 exaflops of ‘AI computing power’. The university claims that this can perform up to 200 quadrillion calculations per second, making Isambard-AI ten times faster on paper than the current fastest supercomputer in the United Kingdom. The system would also end up in the top ten fastest supercomputers in the world.
The intention is for the machine to be put into use in the summer of 2024. The system will then be used by a wide range of British organizations for AI applications, such as training large language models, big data and robotics. With this investment, the UK aims to gain a global leadership position in AI, according to the system’s manufacturer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
The supercomputer will be housed in a self-cooled and self-contained data center at the National Composites Center. The site is located within the Bristol and Bath Science Park, wherever the previously announced Isambard-3 supercomputer should be installed next year. The British government made $10 million available for the latter earlier this year.
The National Composites Center, where the Isambard AI supercomputer should be housed next year