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February 18, 2020 Tuesday 12:07:45 PM IST

Europe's largest Arm supercomputer

Leading universities in the South West region of the United Kingdom, the GW4 Alliance, together with the Met Office, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and partners, have been awarded £4.1 million by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to create Isambard 2, the largest Arm-based supercomputer in Europe. The powerful new £6.5 million facility, to be hosted by the Met Office in Exeter and utilised by the universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter, will double the size of GW4 Isambard, to 21,504 high-performance cores and 336 nodes.

Isambard 2 will also incorporate the latest novel technologies from HPE and new partner Fujitsu, including next-generation Arm CPUs in one of the world’s first A64fx machines from Fujitsu. With significantly increased efficiency, capacity and eight times more memory bandwidth, Fujitsu's A64fx Arm-based processor will push the frontiers of scientific research by supporting the development of powerful new algorithms, paving the way for sophisticated climate modelling and medical research. Isambard has already been used to investigate potential drugs to treat osteoporosis and simulate Parkinson's disease at the molecular level. Isambard 2 will enable researchers to expand this further with the potential for scientific breakthroughs.

The Met Office will host Isambard 2 as it does currently with the Isambard 1 system. Isambard 2 will continue to support their efforts in developing future systems for weather forecasting and climate predictions. With over 350 users from all over the world, Isambard is already one of the most widely used Tier 2 systems. Supercomputers can tackle large scale problems that would not be possible on other machines. With access to Isambard 2, researchers from across GW4 and beyond can choose the best hardware system for their specific scientific problem, saving time and money.

Isambard 2 also offer users the potential to run new advanced AI workloads, while also providing continued access to a world-class Arm system and the most distinctive Multi Architecture Comparison System (MACS) to meet future demand.

(Content Courtesy: https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2020/february/gw4isambard-.html)