Nvidia has announced a supercomputer built on the company’s new Grace CPU Superchip. Part of Nvidia’s “wave of new energy-efficient supercomputers” based on the Arm Neoverse platform, the Isambard 3 supercomputer will be based at the Bristol & Bath Science Park in the United Kingdom and house 384 Arm-based Nvidia Grace CPU Superchips. It is expected to drive advancements in AI, climate science, and medical research, with six times the performance and energy efficiency of Isambard 2 and among the most energy efficient systems in Europe. It will hit about 2.7 petaflops of FP64 peak performance while consuming less than 270 kilowatts of power, making it one of the three greenest non-accelerated supercomputers in the world. The project is led by the University of Bristol, as part of the GW4 Alliance research consortium, along with the universities of Bath, Cardiff and Exeter.
Isambard 3 will enable the European scientific research community to drive breakthroughs in AI, life sciences, medicine, astrophysics, and biotech. It will be built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and be able to make detailed models of complex structures, such as wind farms and fusion reactors, to help researchers unlock new advances in clean and green energy. According to Nvidia Vice President of Hyperscale and HPC Ian Buck, “As climate change becomes an increasingly existential problem, it is vital that computing embraces energy-efficient technologies. Nvidia is collaborating with the Arm Neoverse ecosystem to provide a path forward for the creation of more energy-efficient supercomputing centers, driving major breakthroughs in scientific and industrial research.”
