Britain just launched its top supercomputer. Here’s how it ranks globally

The UK has just launched its most advanced supercomputer — the 11th most powerful in the world. 

Isambard-AI, hosted at the University of Bristol, officially went live this week. The machine was built by Hewlett-Packard Enterprises (HPE) using its Cray EX architecture and fitted with over 5400 NVIDIA Grace Hopper superchips. 

Its raw computing power is measured at 216.5 petaflops, with a peak theoretical performance of 278.6 petaflops. For the uninitiated, one petaflop is equal to 1 quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. The system is more than 10x faster than the UK’s next-fastest supercomputer — the Njoerd supercluster in London.

Funded by £225mn ($300mn) in government money, Isambard-AI is designed to run demanding artificial intelligence and scientific calculations, from modelling protein structures to simulating climate change and training large language models. 

How Isambard-AI compares to the world’s most powerful supercomputers

While Isambard-AI has ...