By Cali Stott, Masters, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering
The GW4 Isambard 3 supercomputer has launched! A collaboration between Bristol, Bath, Cardiff, and Exeter universities helped to deliver this exciting project whilst also partnering with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, NVIDIA, and Arm. The exciting £10 million project will drive innovation in a wide range of areas including clean energy, designing optimal configuration of wind farms, and modelling fusion reactors. But what exactly is a supercomputer? What is so special about this one? What’s in it for the stakeholders?
Supercomputers are, simply, computers with exceptional processing power. They can handle massive databases, vast computations, or both. This is achieved by thousands of nodes – which are computers themselves – each containing a CPU (Central Processing Unit) all communicating with one another to solve problems.
CPUs are like the brain of a computer; responsible for handling data, instructions, and calculations and coordinating the activities of other hardware components. This arrangement allows supercomputers to perform resource intensive calculations that normal computers can’t handle, such as complex physics simulations. Unlike quantum computers, which use quantum algorithms to solve equations, supercomputers use classical computing, and have been used in a much wider range of applications than quantum computers, whose scope is still quite limited.
This arrangement allows supercomputers to perform resource intensive calculations that normal computers can’t handle
Supercomputers allow complex computations and analysis of very large datasets which requires huge amounts of power. These capabilities facilitate the training of large-scale AI models including very deep neural networks where the model has many layers and can therefore learn very abstract and complex features of data. This allows for the creation of very complex models. Isambard 3, for example, will be expected to run molecular-level simulations to understand Parkinson’s disease and processing and analysing large datasets from telescopes to simulate astrophysical phenomena.
Something that really stands out about the Isambard 3 when compared to other modern supercomputers is its energy efficiency. It has been designed to be one of the most energy-efficient, lowest carbon emission CPU-based supercomputers in the world and will reuse waste energy to heat surrounding buildings.
Isambard 3 is also the first supercomputer in the world to use the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip with Arm Neoverse technology. The NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip is a cutting-edge processor designed for high-performance computing. It has a high memory bandwidth allowing it to quickly access the data it needs for a specific task and facilitates connections with other NVIDIA CPUs and GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit – used for digital image processing) to allow for creation of hybrid architectures for more efficient computation. The chip achieves these features, alongside a very high energy efficiency, because it uses manufacturing techniques that can pack billions of transistors onto the chip.
Transistors are switches that control the flow of electricity on a chip and are the building blocks of all the processes carried out by a chip. The more transistors on the chip, the more work the chip can do and the smaller the transistor the more efficient it is. Arm Neoverse technology is a line of high-performance, energy-efficient processors designed for data centres, cloud computing and supercomputers. These processors handle demanding tasks like AI and large-scale simulations while using less power than traditional chips. They are built for scalability, allowing many cores to work together efficiently and deliver fast, reliable data processing. This makes them ideal for modern applications that need both high performance and sustainability like those run on the Isambard 3.
The Isambard 3 is in collaboration with 3 large tech companies, including NVIDIA, a world leader in AI technology. The project will allow these companies to showcase their products, serving as a flagship example of what NVIDIA's Grace CPU Superchip, Arm's architecture, and HPE’s infrastructure can achieve in real-world scenarios. That way they can secure themselves in the AI technology market and potentially form strategic partnerships by solidifying connections with the public sector. It will also allow them to test and refine their technologies by observing them working under demanding workloads, helping identify improvements for future generations of their technology.
Hopefully you now feel up to scratch on what the Isambard 3 supercomputer is and what its capabilities are. It’s not just a powerful computer, but one that could help solve some of the world’s biggest challenges while keeping things sustainable. With some exciting possibilities ahead, Isambard 3 is one to watch.
Featured image: Christy Nunns/University of Bristol
