Nvidia has announced a supercomputer built on the company’s new Grace CPU Superchip. The new computer adds to what Nvidia calls “a wave of new energy-efficient supercomputers” based on the Arm Neoverse platform. The new addition to the Arm Neoverse ecosystem will drive advances in AI, climate science, and medical research.
The US chipmaker explained that the Isambard 3 supercomputer will be based at the Bristol & Bath Science Park in the UK. Furthermore, it will feature 384 Arm-based Nvidia Grace CPU Superchips to power medical and scientific research. The supercomputer should deliver 6x the performance and energy efficiency of Isambard 2. That should place it “among Europe’s most energy-efficient systems”, according to the company.
A UK based project
Nvidia claims the Isambard 3 will achieve about 2.7 petaflops of FP64 peak performance. In addition, it will consume less than 270 kilowatts of power, ranking it among the world’s three greenest non-accelerated supercomputers. The project is being led by the University of Bristol, as part of the research consortium the GW4 Alliance, together with the universities of Bath, Cardiff and Exeter.
“Isambard 3 joins a growing wave of Nvidia Arm-based supercomputers around the world”, the company boasts. These include additional systems that utilise GPUs at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US.
Driving breakthroughs in life science, medicine, and more
Isambard 3 will enable Europe’s scientific research community to supercharge breakthroughs in AI, life sciences, medical, astrophysics and biotech, Nvidia says. It will be built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). “It will be able to create detailed models of exceptionally complex structures, such as wind farms and fusion reactors, to help researchers unlock new advances in clean and green energy”, the company claims.
Ian Buck, vice president of hyperscale and HPC at Nvidia, explained the urgent need for the new supercomputing program. “As climate change becomes an increasingly existential problem, it’s vital for computing to embrace energy-efficient technologies”, he said. “Nvidia is working alongside the Arm Neoverse ecosystem to provide a path forward for the creation of more energy-efficient supercomputing centers, driving important breakthroughs in scientific and industrial research”, Buck added.
19 hours ago
