UK Government Invests £225 Million in AI

As part of the UK Government’s investment in a national AI research resource, the University of Bristol and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP announced that HPE has been selected to deliver the UK’s fastest HPC thanks to £225 million of government funding.

The funding injection, part of a £300 million package to create a new national AI Research Resource (AIRR) for the country announced at the government’s AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, will make the UK a world leader in AI.

To be known as Isambard-AI, it will be 10x more powerful than the UK’s current fastest HPC 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 be designed with technologies to drive AI-driven research
HPE will build and deliver the system with the its Cray EX HPCs and over 5,000 NVIDIA GH200 superchips. The advanced technologies and design will allow Isambard-AI to reach up to 200 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new Bristol facility will be used by a range of organisations from across the UK to harness the power of AI, which is already the main driver of emerging technologies such as training large language models (LLMs), big data and robotics. The new super-computing facility will also play a vital role in important areas such as accelerating automated drug discovery and climate research.

Isambard-AI will connect with a new HPC cluster at the University of Cambridge, called Dawn, which is being developed to offer additional capacity as part of the new national AIRR.

Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, director of the Isambard National Research Facility at the University of Bristol, said: “Isambard-AI represents a huge leap forward for AI computational power in the UK. Today Isambard-AI would rank within the top 10 fastest HPCs in the world and, when in operation later in 2024, it will be one of the most powerful AI systems for open science anywhere. It’s 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 HPCs in the world. Isambard-AI will offer capacity never seen before in the UK for researchers and industry to harness the huge potential of AI in fields such as robotics, big data, climate research and drug discovery.“

Justin Hotard, executive VP and GM, HPC, AI and Labs, HPE said: “Today’s announcement of the UK’s major investment in AI supercomputing underscores its commitment to taking a global leadership position in AI. The Isambard-AI system will harness world-leading supercomputing, including high-performance networking co-developed at HPE’s Bristol labs, to provide the performance and scale required for compute-intensive AI projects. We are proud to partner with the UK Government and the University of Bristol to give UK researchers and industry access to Europe’s largest AI system for open science.“

Ian Buck, VP of hyperscale and HPC, NVIDIA, said: “In building one of the world’s fastest AI HPCs, the UK is demonstrating the importance for nations to create their own infrastructure. Isambard-AI will provide researchers with the same state-of-the-art, AI and HPC compute resources used by the world’s leading AI pioneers, enabling the UK to introduce the next wave of AI and scientific breakthroughs.“

The Government’s new Frontier AI Taskforce will have priority access to support its work to mitigate the risks posed by the most advanced forms of AI, including national security from the development of bioweapons and cyberattacks. The resource will also support the work of the AI Safety Institute, as it develops a program of research looking at the safety of frontier AI models and supports government policy with this analysis.

Michelle Donelan, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, said: “Frontier AI models are becoming exponentially more powerful. At our AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, we have made it clear that Britain is grasping the opportunity to lead the world in adopting this technology safely so we can put it to work and lead healthier, easier and longer lives. This means giving Britain’s leading researchers and scientific talent access to the tools they need to delve into how this complicated technology works. That is why we are investing in building UK’s HPCs, making sure we cement our place as a world-leader in AI safety.“