UK government spending $273 million to build its fastest-ever AI supercomputer

The UK government has just announced it's working on the most powerful supercomputer it's ever built, which will be known as Isambard-AI, which, when it's built, will be one of the most powerful AI supercomputers in the world.

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Isambard-AI will be capable of over 200 quadrillion calculations per second once it's powered on in summer 2024, where it will be housed at the University of Bristol. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is building the new AI supercomputer, which will be powered by 5448 x NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, capable of over 21 exaflops of AI performance and over 21 quintillion floating point operations per second for AI applications like large language models (LLMs).

The University of Bristol says that the new Isambard-AI supercomputer will be 10x faster than the fastest AI supercomputer that's available in the UK today. Isambard-AI will also get connected to other supercomputers that are based in the UK, which will see performance increase even more. Simon McIntosh-Smith from the Univesity of Bristol said that Isambard-AI "will be one of the most powerful AI systems for open science anywhere".

The other AI supercomputer in question is the newly announced Cambridge supercomputer called Dawn, which has been created by Dell and UK SME StackHPC, and is powered with over 1000 x Intel chips that are water-cooled to reduce power consumption. Dawn will be operational in the next 2 months and will be aimed at fusion energy, health care, and climate modeling.

The UK government will be using its new AI supercomputer to test safety features, as well as drive breakthroughs in the drug discovery and clean energy sectors. The government's Frontier AI Taskforce and its new "AI Research Resource" will have priority access to the connected computing tools to support its work to mitigate the risks posed by the most advanced forms of AI, including national security from the development of bioweapons and cyberattacks. The resource will also support the work of the AI Safety Institute, as it develops a programme of research looking at the safety of frontier AI models and supports government policy with this analysis".