GW4 Isambard 2, one of the world’s first Arm-based supercomputers to go into production use, has officially powered down for the final time, after six years of service.
The supercomputer will be succeeded by Isambard 3, a new, TOP500-class supercomputer service for AI and high-performance computing, based at the Bristol and Bath Science Park.
In 2016, together with global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. and the Met Office, the GW4 Alliance – which is comprised of the universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter – was awarded £3m by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to deliver a new Tier 2 high performance computing (HPC) service for scientists. This unique new facility was named ‘Isambard’, after the renowned Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and started service in May 2018.
Due to the success of Isambard 1, in February 2020, GW4 and partners secured a further £4.1m from EPSRC in February 2020 to create Isambard 2, the largest Arm-based supercomputer in Europe at the time.
Over the course of six years, Isambard 2 is estimated to have served over 900 users and completed around 330,000 jobs, totalling 640 million core hours of Arm-based computing power.
Reflecting on the successes of Isambard 1 and 2, Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, Director of the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS) at the University of Bristol, and Principle Investigator for the Isambard supercomputers, said: “The Isambard supercomputers were created to explore whether we could use the UK-based Arm computer architecture to build cutting edge systems. The project exceeded all our hopes, and now Arm-based supercomputers are springing up all over the world, as well as being adopted in many cloud computers. This success has lead to significant scientific progress in the last six years, from investigating new potential treatments for Alzheimer’s and Emphysema, to the design of more efficient wind farms.”
The GW4 Isambard project initially set out to prove that a new Arm-based technology was relevant to supercomputing. Through the GW4 Alliance network, researchers and scientists from different disciplines were able to collaborate with our partners to design a new type of supercomputer and achieve something that would not have been possible as individual institutions.
The GW4 Isambard supercomputer has enabled researchers to tackle large scale problems that would not be possible on other machines. Initially hosted by the Met Office, who wanted to develop more sophisticated weather forecasting and climate prediction modelling, Isambard has also been used to investigate next-generation healthcare and to develop innovations in medicine. Researchers are running molecular level simulations to understand the mechanisms behind Parkinson’s disease, and to help develop new drugs to treat osteoporosis. Research conducted on Isambard was also vital in the fight against COVID-19, contributing to the design of the vaccines by modelling the virus and how vaccines might work against it.
Isambard 2’s successor, Isambard 3, delivers more than six times the performance while also being six times more energy efficient. This step change in capability will enable new research in a wide range of areas, including in the development of new medicines and vaccines, clean energy, modelling optimal configuration of wind farms on both land and water, and modelling fusion reactors to provide green energy in the future. The new collaboration with NVIDIA will also enable Isambard to support cutting-edge research in AI and machine learning.
Isambard 3 continues to push scientific and technological boundaries and will utilise the latest novel technologies, including the new Arm® Neoverse™-based NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip, to provide a production system of 55,296 cores. The new system is one of the first in the world based on NVIDIA’s new Grace Arm-based CPUs.
The powerful facility is hosted in a self-contained HPE Performance Optimized Data Center, or POD, at the National Composites Centre on the Bristol and Bath Science Park. It is officially due to go online before the end of 2024.
Isambard 3 sits alongside the new £225m, University of Bristol-led, Isambard-AI – expected to be the most powerful supercomputer in the UK, and among the most powerful in the world. Isambard-AI forms part of a £300m package to create a new national Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (AIRR) for the country, which was announced by the previous government at an AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, and is designed to make the UK a world-leader in AI.
*Note that the image of GW4 Isambard 1&2 features the previous GW4 logo.
The Isambard supercomputers were created to explore whether we could use the UK-based Arm computer architecture to build cutting edge systems. The project exceeded all our hopes, and now Arm-based supercomputers are springing up all over the world, as well as being adopted in many cloud computers. This success has lead to significant scientific progress in the last six years, from investigating new potential treatments for Alzheimer’s and Emphysema, to the design of more efficient wind farms.”
