Big levers have been pulled, and power is now flowing through the heart of Isambard-AI, UK’s brand new AI supercomputer that carries NVIDIA’s powerful hardware and sophisticated software stack.
Now part of the global elite in high-performance AI infrastructure, the launch ceremony happened at the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS), where U.K. Secretary of State Peter Kyle and leaders from academia, government, and industry celebrated this milestone. The entire infrastructure is made possible in partnership with NVIDIA, HPE, and the University of Bristol.
Kyle also expressed his thoughts on the system and called it “Britain’s super future,” which highlights its role in better public services, scientific discovery, and national security.
The entire system is capable of delivering 21 exaflops of AI performance thanks to 5,448 units of GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips running in tandem as one giant GPU to crunch through all the demands the brits want to throw at all. And for some fun info, Isambard-AI alone is 10 times faster than any other supercomputer in the country and more powerful than all of them combined.
It is also slated to be the 11th top-performing system in the TOP500 SuperComputer charts, as well as the 4th in energy efficiency on the Green500 list.
As for what sort of AI applications can be deployed within Isambard-AI, current early explorations/deployments include the following:
- Nightingale AI – a health model trained on NHS data for personalized care.
- BritLLM – a large language model built to understand both English and Welsh.
- UCL’s Cancer AI – aiming to revolutionize prostate cancer diagnosis using MRI scans.
- EIMCRYSTAL – searching 68 million combinations for greener industrial materials.
- EgoAI – using wearables to help people with everyday tasks, especially those with dementia.
Construction of Isambard-AI kicked off in June 2024, and in just one year, the system is up and running. And the secret behind such streamlined and accelerated development speed, spoken by BriCS director Simon McIntosh-Smith, is treating the entire thing like a high-performance processor project, parallelizing every task possible and even assembling prefabricated modular data halls in just days.
Thanks to detailed and careful planning, Isambard-AI is also way greener than it could be, thanks to HPE’s direct liquid cooling, waterless hybrid towers, and fully carbon-free power.
Finally, management of this asset falls under the U.K. Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, along with UK Research and Innovation, and there’s a big push to ensure access for smaller research groups and startups too.
Management of this asset falls under the U.K. Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, along with UK Research and Innovation, and there’s a big push to ensure access for smaller research groups and startups too.
