The UK’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer officially starts operations at the University of Bristol’s National Composites Centre (NCC).

Supercomputers are seen as fundamental to unleashing the full potential of AI applications, such as training large language models at scale. They will enable researchers and scientists to solve extremely complex challenges that involve huge datasets and billions or even trillions of calculations to bring about advances in healthcare, robotics and climate research.

UK research can now take advantage of this supercomputing capability as the UK’s fastest and most powerful supercomputer – Isambard-AI at the NCC – has officially come online. Isambard-AI, currently in phase 1, is the result of a £225m investment from the UK government last autumn.

The supercomputer is built on an Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Cray EX-based system, which serves as the ‘liquid cooled cabinet’. HPE Cray EX forms the foundation of its computing architecture. At full capacity...