GW4 Isambard 3, a world-class supercomputer service for AI and high-performance computing (HPC), has officially launched this week. It will drive innovative new scientific research in a wide range of areas including in clean energy, designing optimal configuration of wind farms on both land and water, and modelling fusion reactors to provide green energy in the future.

The new £10 million supercomputer, developed as part of a collaboration between the GW4 universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter, and in partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), NVIDIA and Arm, utilises the latest novel technologies, including the new high-performance Arm® Neoverse™-based NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip, to provide a production system of over 55,000 cores. The new system -– one of the first in the world based on NVIDIA Grace – has more than six times the computational performance and energy efficiency of Isambard 2.

Employing the latest in sustainability techniques and practices, 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.

Isambard 3 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 £225 million Artificial Intelligence Research Resource, due to become the UK’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer, and led by the University of Bristol.

The Isambard 3 supercomputer includes an expanded and upgraded multi-architecture comparison system to enable scientifically rigorous performance comparisons and benchmarking across diverse computer architectures. It also features a high-performance storage system from HPE, which delivers expanded input/output (I/O) capabilities with intelligent tiering to support data-intensive workloads, such as AI model training.

Originally hosted by the Met Office, to evaluate the performance of weather forecasting and climate prediction modelling on Arm-based CPUs, GW4 Isambard 1 & 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 UK, and their international collaborators, with access to cutting-edge technology that delivers a transformational increase in performance and energy efficiency.

Professor James Davenport, academic lead for High-Performance Computing at the University of Bath, said: "It is wonderful to see the latest instance of the Isambard collaboration, which has really united the HPC communities at GW4, both the academics and the supporting staff.

"The early Isambard-1 work showed that computers using UK-designed computer architecture were not only as efficient as the US equivalents, but were also easy to move programs to - much easier than many, including myself, had feared.

"Beyond this proof of concept, the Isambard machines have supported much useful research at Bath, and I have a queue of users waiting for Isambard 3.

“One of these projects has been the work on simulation of neo-natal hearts by Team Bath Heart. Blood is a very atypical fluid, and this simulation is vital to designing heart-supplementing pumps for babies rather than adults.”

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 & 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.”

Dr Joanna Jenkinson, GW4 Alliance Director, said: “Building on the success of GW4 supercomputer Isambard, Isambard 3 is a product of collaboration between the GW4 institutions and our partners, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NVIDIA and Arm, and demonstrates the power of academic and industrial partnerships. We are delighted to see the launch of Isambard 3 and look forward to witnessing the accelerated research and innovation capabilities generated by this new supercomputer.”