At the world’s first AI Safety Summit, hosted by the UK in November 2023, the government announced investment that would make British AI supercomputing 30 times more powerful, thanks to a pair of supercomputers named Dawn and Isambard.
The supercomputers Dawn and Isambard, based respectively in Cambridge and Bristol, are part of the government’s AI Research Resource. These national facilities will underpin the UK’s next-generation AI infrastructure, providing AI-specialised compute capacity to researchers, academia and industry.
Now up and running in its state-of-the-art Data Centre in Cambridge, Dawn is currently the most powerful AI supercomputer in the UK, with more than a thousand top-end Intel graphics processing units (GPUs) operating inside its server stacks.
Dawn supercomputer
Dawn supercomputer
The supercomputer’s bespoke innovations in hardware and software result from a long-term co-design partnership between the Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab, directed by Dr Paul Calleja, and global tech leaders Intel and Dell Technologies, with support from the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and UK Research & Innovation.
Dawn is now being deployed for use by scientists within Cambridge and across the UK in critical research fields such as clean energy, personalised medicine and climate.
Here, we take a look at how Dawn is being used to support these ambitious goals, starting with one of the major use cases for the new supercomputer: work by UKAEA to design the UK’s prototype fusion energy power plant.
