A new Lenovo supercomputer designed to support AI research will be housed at the Hartree Center thanks to a grant from the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).
Ten times more powerful than its predecessor, but using less electricity thanks to direct water cooling, the new supercomputer is part of the £210m Hartree National Center for Digital Innovation (HNCDI) programme.
This provides the UK industry with access to digital technologies and expertise and runs in parallel with investments from the wider AI Research Resource (AIRR).
“We are very excited to be working with Lenovo on our next generation of supercomputers at the Hartree Centre. Our mission is to equip UK industry with the knowledge, skills and computing needed to fully unlock the potential of advanced digital technologies” Kate Royse said. , director of the STFC Hartree Centre.
“With our new supercomputer, we will be able to support UK industry in the use of big data and artificial intelligence technologies to enable UK businesses to take a leading role internationally in the responsible adoption and exploitation of technology. of artificial intelligence”.
The 44.7 petaflop GPU-based Lenovo ThinkSystem Neptune will perform more than 44 quadrillion floating point operations per second.
It has ten times the processing power of Hartree Centre's current system, Scafell Pike, and will be more energy efficient, take up less space and use less electricity per unit of output.
It uses innovative hot water cooling that Lenovo says can reduce power demand by up to 40% while increasing performance by up to 10%.
The HNCDI said it expects the new supercomputer to be used for industrial research such as weather and climate models, cleaner energy initiatives, drug discovery, health technologies, new materials, automotive advances and legal applications.
The UK Atomic Energy Authority is already using the Center to research new reactors for clean nuclear fusion energy.
“From advanced modeling and simulation in various scientific disciplines to pioneering work in AI and machine learning, this new low-power supercomputer will be a cornerstone for innovation, pushing the boundaries of big data and AI technologies to strengthen the UK industry's global leadership in responsibility. and ethical technology adoption,” said Noam Rosen, EMEA director of HPC/AI at Lenovo.
The new supercomputer will be installed later this year in HNCDI's new £30 million supercomputing centre, currently under construction.
Lenovo supercomputer latest in UK investment boom
The launch of the Lenovo supercomputer comes amid a period of intense investment across the UK. Last year the government announced plans to build two new supercomputers at the universities of Cambridge and Bristol.
Backed by significant funding, the supercomputers will be used to analyze advanced artificial intelligence models and drive advances in drug discovery and clean energy.
Bristol's supercomputer, Isambard-AI, will be capable of achieving 200 petaflops of performance based on the Top500's Linpack benchmark, around ten times that of the UK's current fastest supercomputer, ARCHER2.
