The UK supercomputer project is a major initiative by the UK government to boost the country’s capabilities in artificial intelligence, weather forecasting, climate research and other highly important scientific research projects.
The project involves building and connecting two new supercomputers across the UK: Isambard-AI and Dawn.
Isambard-AI will be the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, with over 5,400 NVIDIA GH200 superchips, capable of 200 quadrillion calculations per second. It will be based at the University of Bristol and delivered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). It 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.
Dawn will be a new supercomputer cluster at the University of Cambridge, delivered by a partnership with Dell and UK SME StackHPC. It will be powered by over 1,000 Intel chips that use water-cooling to reduce power consumption. It will target breakthroughs in fusion energy, healthcare and climate modelling.
The two supercomputers will form the government’s AI Research Resource (AIRR), which will give researchers access to resources with more than 30-times the capacity of the UK’s current largest public AI computing tools. The AIRR will support the work of the Frontier AI Taskforce and the AI Safety Institute, which are tasked with analysing and mitigating the risks posed by the most advanced forms of AI.
The UK supercomputer project is part of a £300 million investment from the government to create a new national Artificial Intelligence Research Resource for the country. The project is expected to be completed by summer 2024.
The investment comes as the UK hosts an AI safety summit in Bletchley Park, home of World War II codebreakers.
These announcements are all part of the £1 billion supercomputer plan launched in May 2023.