“We are immensely proud to be hosting Isambard-AI at the National Composites Centre. This underpins our vision of bringing together world-class innovators, academic researchers and cutting-edge technology to solve some of the world’s most complex engineering challenges,” said Richard Oldfield, chief executive officer at the National Composites Centre, in comments posted alongside the announcement.
“Building on our expertise and state-of-the-art capability in accelerating industrial transformation from fundamental research to industrial application, we’re excited to be the home of the UK’s national AI supercomputing facility.”
The AIRR will be used by a wide range of organizations from across the UK for AI research and development, playing a vital role in accelerating automated drug discovery and climate research.
UK ramps up its supercomputer investments
Isambard-AI is not the only supercomputer set to open in the UK over the next few years. Earlier today, the government announced the Bristol-based supercomputer will connect with a new supercomputer cluster called Dawn, set to be housed at the University of Cambridge.
Made up of Dell PowerEdge XE9640 servers, Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Data Center GPU Max accelerators, Dawn is being developed to offer additional capacity as part of the new national AIRR.
In addition to the supercomputers at the universities of Bristol and Cambridge, the University of Edinburgh will be home to the UK’s first exascale supercomputer, which will be able to perform a quintillion calculations per second. Dubbed Frontier, the supercomputer will be only one of a handful of its kind when it opens in 2025.
