Britain just launched its top supercomputer. Here’s how it ranks globally
The UK has just launched its most advanced supercomputer — the 11th most powerful in the world.
Isambard-AI, hosted at the University of Bristol, officially went live this week. The machine was built by Hewlett-Packard Enterprises (HPE) using its Cray EX architecture and fitted with over 5400 NVIDIA Grace Hopper superchips.
Its raw computing power is measured at 216.5 petaflops, with a peak theoretical performance of 278.6 petaflops. For the uninitiated, one petaflop is equal to 1 quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. The system is more than 10x faster than the UK’s next-fastest supercomputer — the Njoerd supercluster in London.
Funded by £225mn ($300mn) in government money, Isambard-AI is designed to run demanding artificial intelligence and scientific calculations, from modelling protein structures to simulating climate change and training large language models.
How Isambard-AI compares to the world’s most powerful supercomputers
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
While Isambard-AI has become the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, on the global stage, it faces stiff competition. According to the TOP500 rankings, the current world leader is El Capitan in the United States, which clocks in at a staggering 1,742 petaflops of actual performance.
Frontier and Aurora take second and third place, both American-built systems operating above the 1,000-petaflop threshold — the equivalent of one exaflop. The top three are the world’s only currently operational exascale supercomputers.
Europe’s frontrunner, Germany’s JUPITER Booster, ranks fourth globally. The continent also hosts four other machines in the top 10: Italy’s HPC6 (6th), Switzerland’s Alps (8th), Finland’s LUMI (9th), and Italy’s Leonardo (10th).
Still, Isambard-AI’s entry into the top 11 is a significant leap for the UK, whose Labour government wants to make the country a leader in AI development.
Peter Kyle, the UK’s science, innovation, and technology secretary, said the new machine would “propel” Britain to the “forefront of AI discovery.”
“Today we put the most powerful computer system in the country into the hands of British researchers and entrepreneurs,” he said.
Some of the first applications of Isambard-AI include powering a prostate cancer detection system developed by University College London and helping Liverpool researchers discover greener, more sustainable industrial materials.
But Isambard-AI’s reign at the top may be short-lived. In June, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration committed £750mn to a supercomputer in Edinburgh that aims to give the UK one of the world’s few exascale systems.
