Arm supercomputer running on Nvidia Grace CPU Superchip

Nvidia has announced a supercomputer built on the company’s new Grace CPU Superchip. The new computer is part of what Nvidia calls “a wave of new energy-efficient supercomputers” based on the Arm Neoverse platform. The new addition to the Arm Neoverse ecosystem will drive advancements in AI, climate science and medical research.

The American chipmaker explains that the Isambard 3 supercomputer will be based at the Bristol & Bath Science Park in the United Kingdom. Furthermore, it will house 384 Arm-based Nvidia Grace CPU Superchips. The supercomputer is to drive the advancement of medical and scientific research. The system would be six times as good and energy efficient as Isambard 2. That should make the computer “among the most energy efficient systems in Europe”, according to the company.

A British project

Nvidia claims the Isambard 3 will hit about 2.7 petaflops of FP64 peak performance. In addition, it will consume less than 270 kilowatts of power, making it one of the three greenest non-accelerated supercomputers in the world. The project is led by the University of Bristol, as part of the GW4 Alliance research consortium, along with the universities of Bath, Cardiff and Exeter.

“Isambard 3 joins a growing wave of Nvidia Arm-based supercomputers around the world,” the company boasts. This includes additional systems that use GPUs in the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US.

For breakthroughs in life sciences, medicine and more

Isambard 3 will enable the European scientific research community to drive breakthroughs in AI, life sciences, medicine, astrophysics and biotech, according to Nvidia. It will be built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise(HPE). “It will be able to create detailed models of exceptionally complex structures, such as wind farms and fusion reactors, to help researchers unlock new advancements in clean and green energy,” the company claims.

Ian Buck, vice president of hyperscale and HPC at Nvidia, explained the urgent need for the new supercomputing program. “As climate change becomes an increasingly existential problem, it is vital that computing embraces energy-efficient technologies,” he said. “Nvidia is collaborating with the Arm Neoverse ecosystem to provide a path forward for the creation of more energy-efficient supercomputing centers, driving major breakthroughs in scientific and industrial research,” added Buck.

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