The University of Bristol and the University of Cambridge will house the UK’s most powerful supercomputers.

The University of Bristol will receive an investment of £225 million to create the UK’s most powerful AI supercomputer in partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The funding is part of a £300 million package to create a national Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (AIRR) for the country, which was announced at the government’s AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park this week.

The University of Bristol said the supercomputer, called Isambard-AI, will be ten times more powerful than the UK's current fastest supercomputer and among the most powerful in the world when it opens at the National Composites Centre (NCC) in the summer of 2024.

Isambard-AI will connect with a supercomputer cluster at the University of Cambridge called Dawn, which is being co-designed by Intel and Dell Technologies.

The University of Cambridge said Dawn will vastly increase the country's AI and simulation compute capacity for both fundamental research and industrial use. The university added that Dawn is expected to drive significant advancements in healthcare, green fusion energy development and climate modelling.

Professor Emily Shuckburgh, director of Cambridge Zero and the Institute of Computing for Climate Science said: “The coupling of AI and simulation methods is a growing and increasingly essential part of climate research. It is central to data-driven predictions and equation discovery, both of which are at the fore in climate science.”

She added: “This incredible new resource – Dawn – at Cambridge will enable software engineers and researchers at the Institute of Computing for Climate Science to accelerate their work helping to address the global challenges associated with climate change.”

Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, director of the Isambard National Research Facility at the University of Bristol, described the move as a “huge leap” for AI computational power in the UK.

“Today Isambard-AI would rank within the top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world and, when in operation later in 2024, it will be one of the most powerful AI systems for open science anywhere,” he continued. "It's immensely exciting to be at the forefront of the AI revolution and to partner with industry leaders HPE and NVIDIA to rapidly build and deploy large-scale research computing infrastructure to create one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.”

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