The UK government Wednesday, November 1, announced its intention to invest funds in the amount of 225 million pounds ($273 million) in a supercomputer with artificial intelligence.
This decision is a testament to the desire of the United Kingdom to take a leading position in the advanced technology industry. Also in this context, London’s desire to improve its competitiveness in comparison with the capabilities of Washington and Beijing in the so-called artificial intelligence race is evident. At the same time, some experts note that the United Kingdom has yet to reach the level of development that is already characteristic of the United States and Beijing in the sphere of machine intelligence. This advanced technology has a huge potential, the full implementation of which can lead to the transformation of the landscape of human existence in many of its dimensions and aspects. London, realizing the prospects of owning AI technologies, strives to develop in the appropriate direction and strengthen its position in this industry.
The UK government announced plans to invest in a supercomputer on the first day of the Artificial Intelligence Security Summit, which is taking place in Bletchley Park, located in the city of Milton Keynes in the south-east of the United Kingdom.
The University of Bristol will create a supercomputer named Isambard-AI in honor of the 19th-century British engineer Isambard Brunel. The Government of the United Kingdom announced that this development will be the most advanced computer in the country and will be 10 times faster than the fastest machine in the state at the moment.
Isambard-AI will be equipped with 5448 GH200 Grace Hopper superchips. These are powerful microcircuits of artificial intelligence made by the American semiconductor giant Nvidia, which specializes in high-performance computing apps.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise, an IT giant from the United States, will take part in the process of creating a supercomputer. The new machine will be connected to the announced Cambridge supercomputer called Dawn. This development will become part of the so-called research resource of the British government on artificial intelligence.
The Cambridge supercomputer will be designed to solve complex tasks, including research in the sphere of science and similar actions in the interests of industry, and the development of various proposals for the healthcare sector. The machine will also be used in the framework of engineering and for modeling scenarios for the development of the climate change process and finding ways to overcome the problems associated with it.
Intel has announced that Dawn will be the fastest supercomputer with artificial intelligence in the UK. This is in a sense a routine and standard statement. The creators of Isambard-AI are positioning their future development with a similar tactic.
It is currently known that the University of Bristol supercomputer is aiming for 200 petaflops, which is the supposed theoretical peak. One petaflops is equal to 1015 flops. A flop is a unit of measurement for computer performance.
Full information about the technical characteristics of Dawn is still unknown. The relevant data, according to media reports, will be made public at the SC23 conference on supercomputing technologies, which will be held in late November in the United States. At the same time, it is already known that Dawn will be equipped with Dell PowerEdge XE9640, 2U boxen servers, a pair of scalable Intel Xeon 4th generation processors, and four Intel Data Center GPU Max accelerators. Liquid cooling will help to avoid overheating of the machine during the execution of computing operations.
The UK government expects supercomputers to be launched next summer. With the help of these machines, researchers will be able to analyze advanced artificial intelligence models, including for testing security functions. These developments also can stimulate the development of new medicines and solutions in the sphere of clean energy.
The British government has already allocated 1 billion pounds to invest in the semiconductor industry as part of efforts to ensure the supply of microcircuits to the country and reduce its dependence on East Asia in this matter.
As we have reported earlier, UK Antitrust Watchdog Publishes Principles for AI Regulation.
