A new £10m supercomputer that will be used to drive scientific research around clean energy has launched. The high-performance GW4 Isambard 3 was developed as part of a collaboration between the GW4 universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter, and in partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, AI firm NVIDIA and technology provider Arm.
It will be used - among other things - for designing optimal configuration of wind farms on land and water, and modelling fusion reactors to provide green energy in the future.
According to the University of Bath, the computer utilises the latest novel technologies, including a new high-performance Arm superchip to provide a production system of over 55,000 cores. The system has more than six times the computational performance and energy efficiency of Isambard 2, which was retired in September.
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Isambard 3 has been designed to operate as one of the most energy-efficient, lowest carbon emitting CPU-based supercomputers in the world, with the potential to reuse waste energy to heat surrounding buildings.
It is hosted in a self-cooled, self-contained HPE Performance Optimized Data Center (POD) at the National Composites Centre on the Bristol and Bath Science Park. The site is also home to Isambard-AI, a new, national £225m AI research resource, which is due to become the 海角视频’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer, and led by the University of Bristol.
Originally hosted by the Met Office to evaluate the performance of weather forecasting and climate prediction modelling on Arm-based CPUs, GW4 Isambard 1 and 2 were used for research across a wide range of scientific areas, including investigating next-generation healthcare and developing innovations in medicine.
Research conducted on Isambard was also vital in the fight against COVID-19, contributing to the development of vaccines by helping scientists understand how they would interact with the virus.
Isambard 3 will expand on these capabilities, providing researchers across the 海角视频, and their international collaborators, with access to cutting-edge technology that delivers a transformational increase in performance and energy efficiency.
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Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, director of the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS) at the University of Bristol, and Principle Investigator for the Isambard supercomputers, said: “Our work across GW4 Isambard 1 and 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 artificial intelligence and scientific simulations.”