Nvidia (NVDA) and the University of Bristol debuted the UK’s Isambard-AI supercomputer on Thursday, part of Nvidia’s push into so-called sovereign AI, or AI supercomputers built for individual nations.
The fastest supercomputer in the country and one of the most energy-efficient supercomputers globally, the Isambard-AI supercomputer combines 5,448 Nvidia Grace Hopper superchips through a series of liquid-cooled HPE server cabinets packed with 440 GPUs each.
The system is meant to perform research on everything from materials science to drug discovery to large language models designed for UK-specific languages such as Welsh.
Impressively, according to University of Bristol professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, the entire system came together in less than two years. Normally, it takes more than three years to complete similar projects, McIntosh-Smith, who also heads the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS), told Yahoo Finance.
Researchers and companies will need to apply for access to the Isambard-AI supercomputer via the UK government’s Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology. Supercomputers, however, don’t just run individual tasks at once. Depending on the time of day, such systems can run a host of different experiments at the same time, helping to improve overall efficiency
While the Isambard-AI supercomputer is powerful as far as research computers go, it’s relatively small compared to the massive datacenter-scale systems companies like Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Meta (META), and Microsoft (MSFT) currently run.
Those warehouse-sized computers require gigawatts, or 1 billion watts, of electricity to power tens of thousands of GPUs. The Isambard-AI supercomputer, meanwhile, uses 5 megawatts, or 5 million watts.
According to McIntosh-Smith, the team at BriCS chose to use a liquid cooling solution rather than traditional air cooling with fans to keep the Isambard-AI from overheating, because it allowed them to pack more GPUs into a smaller space while improving overall energy efficiency.
The university is also working on a pilot program that will use the hot wastewater from the supercomputer to heat campus facilities and eventually nearby homes and businesses.
While the University of Bristol officially flipped the switch on Isambard-AI on Thursday, McIntosh-Smith said some researchers have already been running experiments on a test version of the system. Those include work on vaccines for Alzheimer’s disease and image recognition to help machines better identify skin cancer.
