As part of a recent wave of new energy-efficient supercomputers based on the Arm Neoverse architecture, NVIDIA has revealed a supercomputer built on the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip. With its newly created supercomputer, NVIDIA obviously hopes to take on AMD and Intel in the semiconductor industry. NVIDIA has developed this powerful computing equipment together with British academics and the manufacturer of supercomputers, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
The 384 Arm-based NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchips in this newly developed Isambard 3 supercomputer, which will be based in the Bristol & Bath Science Park in the United Kingdom and power medical and scientific research, are expected to deliver 6x the performance and energy efficiency of Isambard 2. This makes it one of Europe’s most energy-efficient systems.
It would be among the top three most environmentally friendly non-accelerated supercomputers in the world with peak performance of roughly 2.7 petaflops on the FP64 benchmark and a power consumption of less than 270 kilowatts. Together with the universities of Bath, Cardiff, and Exeter, the University of Bristol is leading the project as part of the research alliance known as the GW4 Alliance.
Isambard 3 is the next in a line of NVIDIA Arm-based supercomputers that are being developed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and the United States’ Los Alamos National Laboratory. In addition, HPE is installing Grace CPUs in the HPE Cray EX supercomputers that the Swiss National Computing Center and the American Los Alamos National Laboratory have purchased. Grace CPUs will be included in servers for data centers by Nvidia later this year.
AI, Life Sciences, Medicine, Astronomy, Biotech
Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Isambard 3 would allow the scientific research community in Europe to accelerate advancements in AI, life sciences, medicine, astronomy, and biotech. To assist researchers in making new discoveries in clean and renewable energy, it will be able to build intricate simulations of very complicated systems like wind farms and fusion reactors.
The Isambard 2 system’s simulation of molecular-level processes will be continued by the Arm-based, NVIDIA Grace-powered system in an effort to better comprehend Parkinson’s disease and discover fresh approaches to treating COVID-19 and osteoporosis. These computationally demanding applications would benefit from Grace’s best-in-class cores, memory bandwidth, and memory capacity per core.
“Isambard 3’s application performance efficiency of up to 6x its predecessor, which rivals many of the 50 fastest TOP500 systems, will provide scientists with a revolutionary new supercomputing platform to advance groundbreaking research,” said Simon McIntosh-Smith, principal investigator for the Isambard project and professor of HPC at the University of Bristol. “The Arm-based NVIDIA Grace CPU enables the breakthrough energy efficiency required to push the boundaries of scientific discovery and solve some of humanity’s most difficult challenges.”
Bristol anticipates that the current 800 registered users will more than double after the system goes live in the spring of 2024.
“As climate change becomes an increasingly existential problem, it’s vital for computing to embrace energy-efficient technologies,” said Ian Buck, Vice President of Hyperscale and HPC at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is working alongside the Arm Neoverse ecosystem to provide a path forward for the creation of more energy-efficient supercomputing centers, driving important breakthroughs in scientific and industrial research.”
