UK's Isambard-AI super powers up as government goes AI crazy

Britain's beefiest supercomputer, Isambard-AI, is set to become fully operational this summer, as the government steps up its strategy to push AI everywhere as a driver for economic recovery.

Announced about 18 months ago, Isambard-AI has been touted as a huge leap forward for AI compute power in the UK.

Based on the HPE Cray EX4000 system, it incorporates over 5,000 of Nvidia's Grace-Hopper GPUs, and is expected to deliver over 21 exaFLOPS of 8-bit floating point performance for LLM training, and more than 250 petaFLOP/s of 64-bit performance.

Construction started on the site to house the new system last June, at the National Composites Centre (NCC) in the Bristol and Bath Science Park, but this June the team in charge is starting to power everything up and preparing to welcome the first early access users.

"We're going through bring-up now, which takes a few ...