About Isambard 3

Isambard 3 is a supercomputing collaboration between the GW4 universities (University of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter) and the UKRI.

GW4 secured £10 million UKRI funding to create the next-generation NVIDIA Grace™ Isambard 3 supercomputer for AI and cutting-edge scientific innovations.

The new high performance computing (HPC) system utilising breakthrough technologies such as the new Arm®Neoverse™-based NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip will have 55,296 cores to support large scale scientific experiments and will be ready for use in early 2025. Isambard 3 runs on Cray Linux with Cray compilers and includes an AArch 64-bit processor, so Intel-based software will need to be rebuilt to fit the new architecture. Full specifications of the system are available here.

The supercomputer is named after the renowned Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Applying for an allocation on Isambard

As part of our involvement in the project, Bath has 10% of the compute time on the machine.

Researchers can apply for an account to explore the performance of their codes and to make a technical case for their use of Isambard. In order to manage our allocation we distribute time on Isambard via a lightweight allocation panel which reviews the scientific and technical aspects of proposed projects.

Currently the system is in its final testing phase with early access projects, and Bath's account registration process for the new system is not fully defined, however if you are interested in running a project on Isambard, register your interest with the Research Computing team by submitting a ticket to TOPdesk.

Further information

Further information about GW4 Isambard HPC can be found here: http://gw4.ac.uk/isambard/.

Isambard user documentation can be found here: https://docs.isambard.ac.uk/.