The UK's university alliance GW4, has secured a £10m investment from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
The alliance, which brings together the universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter, will use the funding to create a World Top 500 supercomputer for AL and cutting-edge scientific innovations. The four universities secured the investment in partnership with technology giants NVIDIA, Arm and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
Named Isambard 3, the new high performance computing (HPC) system will utilise breakthrough technologies such as the new Arm®Neoverse™-based NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip and have at least 55,000 cores to support large scale scientific experiments.
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It will be one of the first NVIDIA Grace supercomputers in the world. With more than six times the computational performance of its predecessor (Isambard 2).
Professor Ian White, vice-chancellor and president at the University of Bath and chair of GW4 Council, said: "This ambitious project exemplifies university-industry collaboration and the world-leading capability of our region in advanced engineering and digital innovation.
"Isambard 3 will further strengthen the UK’s research and innovation ecosystem - supporting world-leading, cutting-edge research and attracting international researchers, scientists and developers to support the UK’s ambitions to be a science superpower."
Mark Armstrong, vice president and general manager of HPC, AI and Labs for Europe, Middle East and Africa, at HPE, added: "Supercomputers like Isambard 3 provide maximum performance and capabilities that are fundamental to unleashing the full potential of AI applications, such as running natural language processing at scale."
It is expected Isambard 3 will be installed later this year, with user migration taking place over winter, and the new facility ready for use in early 2024.
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