Isambard 3 is located on the Bristol and Bath Science Park in Emersons Green, South Gloucestershire.
The new £10 million supercomputer features Arm-based Nvidia Grace CPU Superchips — one of the first systems in the world to be based on Grace and offers more than six times the computational performance and energy efficiency of recently retired Isambard 2.
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Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, director of the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS) at the University of Bristol, and principal investigator for the Isambard supercomputers: “Our work across GW4 Isambard 1 & 2 has already pushed the boundaries of scientific research, and we have enabled significant developments across areas such as sustainable net zero, green energy and healthcare.
“With its advanced capabilities, Isambard 3 will take this research to the next level, supporting collaborations with our academic and industrial partners all over the world, and accelerating our understanding in areas such as AI and scientific simulations.”
The new supercomputer was developed as part of a collaboration between the GW4 universities: Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter.
It boasts over 55,000 cores and will be used for a range of scientific research, including efforts spanning clean energy, optimal configurations for wind farms, and modelling fusion reactors.
The supercomputer is housed in a self-cooled, self-contained HPE Performance Optimised Data Centre (POD) — the same site as the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, Isambard-AI.
The latest system is designed to be one of the most energy-efficient, lowest carbon-emitting CPU-based supercomputers in the world, with waste energy being used to heat surrounding buildings.
“Energy-efficient supercomputing is crucial for tackling global challenges while minimising environmental impact,” said John Josephakis, global VP of sales and business development for HPC and supercomputing at Nvidia. “The GW4 group of universities’ Isambard 3 system, now powered by Nvidia Grace, enables high-performance computing for complex scientific and research applications on one of the world’s most sustainable supercomputers.”
Matt Harris, SVP and managing director for UK, Ireland, Middle East and Africa at HPE, said: “We are proud to see the GW4 Isambard 3 supercomputer go online, a testament to our commitment to advancing high-performance computing and artificial intelligence and supporting the UK’s ambition to be a global leader in science and technology. Isambard 3’s compute capability will significantly enhance research and innovation across the region.”
It wasn’t the best outing in the latest Top500 list for Isambard 3’s neighbour Isambard-AI, as the £225 million government-backed supercomputer dropped from position 128 to 155 on the power rankings.
It also fell from being the second-greenest system last time out to fourth, being replaced by ROMEO-2025 and Adastra 2.
Isambard-AI is still early in its life, with the team behind it installing the data centre which will house the supercomputer. The shelter, specially designed in the Netherlands, is expected to be completed in 2025 with even winter weather failing to hamper efforts.
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