Latest news with #supercomputer
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Nvidia and University of Bristol debut UK's fastest AI supercomputer in sovereign AI push
Nvidia (NVDA) and the University of Bristol debuted the UK's Isambard-AI supercomputer on Thursday, part of Nvidia's push into so-called sovereign AI, or AI supercomputers built for individual nations. The fastest supercomputer in the country and one of the most energy-efficient supercomputers globally, the Isambard-AI supercomputer combines 5,448 Nvidia Grace Hopper superchips through a series of liquid-cooled HPE server cabinets packed with 440 GPUs each. The system is meant to perform research on everything from materials science to drug discovery to large language models designed for UK-specific languages such as Welsh. Impressively, according to University of Bristol professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, the entire system came together in less than two years. Normally, it takes more than three years to complete similar projects, McIntosh-Smith, who also heads the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS), told Yahoo Finance. Researchers and companies will need to apply for access to the Isambard-AI supercomputer via the UK government's Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology. Supercomputers, however, don't just run individual tasks at once. Depending on the time of day, such systems can run a host of different experiments at the same time, helping to improve overall efficiency While the Isambard-AI supercomputer is powerful as far as research computers go, it's relatively small compared to the massive datacenter-scale systems companies like Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG, GOOGL), Meta (META), and Microsoft (MSFT) currently run. Those warehouse-sized computers require gigawatts, or 1 billion watts, of electricity to power tens of thousands of GPUs. The Isambard-AI supercomputer, meanwhile, uses 5 megawatts, or 5 million watts. According to McIntosh-Smith, the team at BriCS chose to use a liquid cooling solution rather than traditional air cooling with fans to keep the Isambard-AI from overheating, because it allowed them to pack more GPUs into a smaller space while improving overall energy efficiency. The university is also working on a pilot program that will use the hot wastewater from the supercomputer to heat campus facilities and eventually nearby homes and businesses. While the University of Bristol officially flipped the switch on Isambard-AI on Thursday, McIntosh-Smith said some researchers have already been running experiments on a test version of the system. Those include work on vaccines for Alzheimer's disease and image recognition to help machines better identify skin cancer. The Isambard-AI supercomputer is just one example of Nvidia's push into sovereign AI, which represents a new revenue stream for the company beyond individual tech companies. In May, CEO Jensen Huang attended an event held in Saudi Arabia where President Trump announced that he would allow Nvidia to sell thousands of GPUs to companies within the country. The administration also set up a plan to sell hundreds of thousands of chips to the United Arab Emirates, but officials are holding off on moving forward with the deal over concerns China could gain access to the technology, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. And in June, Nvidia touted its expansion in Europe, announcing that companies across France, the UK, Germany, and Italy will build out or expand on their AI infrastructure. "Every industrial revolution begins with infrastructure. AI is the essential infrastructure of our time, just as electricity and the internet once were," Huang said in a statement at the time. "With bold leadership from Europe's governments and industries, AI will drive transformative innovation and prosperity for generations to come." The US still accounts for the majority of Nvidia's sales, making up $61.2 billion of the company's $130.4 billion in total revenue in its latest fiscal year. Taiwan and China made up $20.5 billion and $17.1 billion, respectively. Singapore saw $23.6 billion in sales, but Nvidia said the majority of those shipments are simply invoiced in the country and shipped elsewhere. Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@ Follow him on X/Twitter at @DanielHowley. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
The Independent
2 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
UK's most powerful supercomputer comes online in major AI drive
Britain's most powerful supercomputer has come online as the Government unveils plans for a major drive in AI research across the country. Technology Secretary Peter Kyle flicked the switch on the Isambard-AI machine in Bristol on Thursday, in a move ministers say will help the UK develop new medical cures and tools to cut emissions. The Government has pledged £1 billion to increase Britain's compute capacity 20-fold by 2030, including through the creation of a series of AI 'growth zones' designed to hasten planning approvals for new data centres. One of these will be built in Scotland, where Chancellor Rachel Reeves has also confirmed £750 million of funding will be dedicated to developing another supercomputer in Edinburgh, and another in Wales. Together with a second existing supercomputer in Cambridge, Isambard is expected to be able to process in one second 'what it would take the entire global population 80 years to achieve', the Government said. Businesses and scientists are expected to be able to use the systems to process more of the data required to train and build AI models to make new drug discoveries and breakthroughs in climate change technology. Researchers at the University of Liverpool are already using the machine to sift through tens of millions of chemical combinations in the hopes of finding ways to decarbonise British industry. The plans form part of the new Compute Roadmap, a strategy aimed at reducing reliance on foreign processing power and transform the UK's public compute capacity. By 2030, the Government expects this capacity to increase to 420 AI exaFLOP – the equivalent of one billion people spending 13,316 years doing what the system will do in one second. To support the plans, researchers, academics and tech bosses have been brought together to develop an AI science strategy to be published in the autumn. The group includes Google DeepMind vice-president Pushmeet Kohli, vice-president of the Royal Society Alison Noble and chairwoman of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Charlotte Deane. Ms Reeves said the plans would 'transform our public services, drive innovation and fuel economic growth that puts money in people's pockets'. Mr Kyle said they would 'put a rocket under our brilliant researchers, scientists and engineers – giving them the tools they need to make Britain the best place to do their work.'
BBC News
2 days ago
- Business
- BBC News
UK's most powerful supercomputer Isambard-AI comes online
A supercomputer that is the most powerful in the UK has been made fully operational in Secretary Peter Kyle "flicked the switch" on the Isambard-AI machine as the government unveiled fresh artificial intelligence computer will become part of the UK's public AI computing capacity along with a machine in Cambridge called aim is to use the supercomputer for public projects such as bringing down NHS waiting lists and developing new tools to tackle climate change - although AI is notoriously energy-hungry. In addition, the government announced that Scotland and Wales will be in line for billions of investment in so-called AI Growth of the Isambard-AI computer was being used in January for a medical project to develop vaccines, but it has now been turned on the name suggests, a supercomputer has more processing power and can complete more tasks more quickly than a less powerful processes data in the same binary format as regular computers but uses thousands more processing units to analyse more data at faster speeds. 'Huge advances' Along with Dawn, the supercomputers will form the UK's "AI Research Resource" and will be available for public projects, although they won't combine computing resource, which may in future include other supercomputers, will be expanded 20-fold over the next five years, the government said. Speaking to BBC News, Kyle said AI would enable "huge, unimaginable advances in the cure of disease"."But it's also going to change the workplace. In order to benefit from that, you have to be prepared."The government is preparing and training a million students in AI, and 7.5 million people will be trained in the broad economy in the coming months and said he understood that people may be "anxious about the future" in terms of how AI would affect their jobs, but the UK was "already seeing huge improvements in productivity" due to the technology."AI is going to happen to Britain," he said. "What we can do, and what we have a choice over, is how it happens in Britain." Isambard-AI uses more than 5,400 Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, with Hewlett-Packard technology, while Dawn, at the University of Cambridge, uses more than 1,000 Intel chips, along with Dell supercomputer was built by the University of Bristol, but paid for using public money. David Hogan, Nvidia's European vice president, said Isambard-AI was a "truly transformational machine" but that it was "just a starting point".To support the government's plans, researchers, academics and tech bosses have been brought together to develop an AI strategy to be published in the group includes Google DeepMind vice president Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of the Royal Society, Alison Noble, and chairwoman of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Charlotte Deane. The UK government has claimed that more investment in and scaling up of British supercomputers will help it fulfil its plans for growth and "position the country as an AI maker rather than an AI taker".Companies around the world are currently vying to acquire the best talent and hardware in the sector to try and cement their dominance in Bristol supercomputer recently ranked 11th in the latest list of the world's top 500 most powerful, commercially available computers.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Science
- The Guardian
UK's £225m AI supercomputer, Isambard-AI, launches in Bristol
Britain's new £225m national artificial intelligence supercomputer will be used to spot sick dairy cows in Somerset, improve the detection of skin cancer on brown skin and help create wearable AI assistants that could help riot police anticipate danger. Scientists hope Isambard-AI – named after the 19th-century engineer of groundbreaking bridges and railways, Isambard Kingdom Brunel – will unleash a wave of AI-powered technological, medical and social breakthroughs by allowing academics and public bodies access to the kind of vast computing power previously the preserve of private tech companies. The supercomputer was formally switched on in Bristol on Thursday by the secretary of state for science and technology, Peter Kyle, who said it gave the UK 'the raw computational horsepower that will save lives, create jobs, and help us reach net zero-ambitions faster'. The machine is fitted with 5,400 Nvidia 'superchips' and sits inside a black metal cage topped with razor wire north of the city. It will consume almost £1m a month of mostly nuclear-powered electricity and will run 100,000 times faster than an average laptop. Amid fierce international competition for computing power, it is the largest publicly acknowledged facility in the UK but will be the 11th fastest in the world behind those in the US, Japan, Germany, Italy, Finland and Switzerland. Elon Musk's new xAI supercomputer in Tennessee already has 20 times its processing power, while Meta's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, is planning a datacentre that 'covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan'. The investment is part of the government's £2bn push to attain 'AI sovereignty' so Britain does not have to rely on foreign processing chips to make AI-enabled research progress. But the switch-on could trigger new ethical dilemmas about how far AI should be allowed to steer policy on anything from the control of public protests to the breeding of animals. One AI model under development by academics at the University of Bristol is an algorithm that learns from thousands of hours of footage on human motion, captured using wearable cameras. The idea is to try to predict how humans could move next. It could be applied to a wide range of scenarios, including enabling police to predict how crowds of protesters may behave, or predict accidents in an industrial setting such as a construction site. Dima Damen, a professor of computer vision at the university, said based on patterns in the human behaviours a wearable camera was capturing in real time, the algorithm, trained by Isambard-AI, could even 'give an early warning that in the next two minutes, something is likely to happen here'. Damen added there were 'huge ethical implications of AI' and it would be important to always know why a system made a decision. 'One of the fears of AI is that some people will own the technology and the knowhow and others won't,' she said. 'It's our biggest duty as researchers to make sure that the data and the knowledge is available for everyone.' Another AI model under development could detect early infections in cows. A herd in Somerset is being filmed around the clock to train a model to predict if an animal is in the early stages of mastitis, which affects milk production and is an animal welfare problem. The scientists at Bristol believe this could be possible based on detecting subtle shifts in cows' social behaviour. 'The farmer obviously takes a great interest in their herd, but they don't necessarily have the time to look at all of the cows in their herd continuously day in, day out, so the AI will be there to provide that view,' said Andrew Dowsey, a professor of health data science at the University of Bristol. A third group of researchers are using the supercomputer to detect bias in the detection of skin cancer. James Pope, a senior lecturer in data science at the University of Bristol, has already run 'quadrillions if not quintillions of computations' on Isambard to find that current phone apps to check moles and lesions for signs of cancer are performing better on lighter coloured skin. If confirmed with further testing, apps could be retuned to avoid bias. 'It would be quite difficult, and frankly impossible to do it with a traditional computer,' he said.
The Sun
2 days ago
- Health
- The Sun
Monster supercomputer switched on to help cure cancer, slash NHS waits and keep OAPs independent longer
A MONSTER supercomputer that could help cure cancer, slash NHS waiting times and even help pensioners stay independent for longer was switched on today. The £225million machine – named Isambard-AI – is now live in Bristol and is powerful enough to process 80 years' worth of calculations in a single second. 2 2 It will be used to slash NHS waiting times, fast-track green tech, and power life-saving breakthroughs from dementia care to heart disease. Standing in front of the artificial intelligence beast, Tech Secretary Peter Kyle told The Sun his mother, who died of lung cancer, could have been saved by Isambard-AI. He said: 'I am in no doubt whatsoever that if my mum had been scanned today, rather than just over a decade ago, she'd still be alive. 'There is no better connection to what this supercomputer AI and technology is doing than keeping a mum and son together for longer.' He added: "Diseases are going to be cured.' The computer is already being used to speed up prostate cancer diagnoses, train AI to detect skin cancer more fairly across all skin tones, and analyse early memory loss in dementia patients by processing personal camera footage in minutes - something that once took weeks. Scientists are also modelling how proteins behave in the body, which could unlock new treatments for cancer and inherited heart conditions. Farmers are getting help too - with AI trained on 24/7 cow surveillance footage to spot illness early, limit infections and even help cut methane emissions. Unlike secretive private data labs, Isambard is publicly run - and ministers will choose who gets to use it. Mr Kyle said: 'My job is to make sure that my department makes wise choices. I won't be sitting there picking and choosing the applications myself, but I am creating the circumstances where the best choices can be made.' The launch comes as the Government unveils its Compute Roadmap, a major strategy to boost the UK's processing power twenty-fold by 2030 – aiming to turn Britain into an 'AI maker, not a taker'. A second public supercomputer – called Dawn – is already operating in Cambridge, and a third is due to open in Edinburgh later this year, where the UK's first National Supercomputing Centre will be based. The plan also includes creating AI Growth Zones in Scotland and Wales, where private investment is expected to pour in, creating thousands of new jobs. These zones will offer fast-track planning for data centres and training hubs, powered by cutting-edge energy sources such as small modular reactors (SMRs). It comes amid growing concern that massive AI infrastructure could hike household bills - with Amazon's new AI hub in Indiana expected to use more power than one million homes. But Mr Kyle insisted Britain would not follow the same path, explaining: "We are not going to do it in a way that will increase the cost of electricity. 'In fact, we are driving down the cost of electricity in the short term, and into the long term.' Isambard-AI, which weighs the same as 25 elephants, is powered entirely by zero-carbon electricity and cooled with liquid pipes instead of fans to keep emissions low. Built in under two years by the University of Bristol and tech firms NVIDIA and HPE, it is the 11st faster supercomputer in the world and 9th for public supercomputing.
