Ambitious goals for Dawn 鈥� the UK's fastest AI supercomputer

lw355 — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 06:30:12 +0000

Dawn is now being deployed for use by scientists within Cambridge and across the UK to support ambitious goals in clean energy, personalised medicine and climate.

Cambridge, Intel and Dell join forces on UK鈥檚 fastest AI supercomputer

cjb250 — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 10:51:14 +0000

Dawn has been created via a highly innovative long-term co-design partnership between the 探花直播 of Cambridge, UK Research & Innovation, the UK Atomic Energy Authority and global tech leaders Intel and Dell Technologies. This partnership brings highly valuable technology first-mover status and inward investment into the UK technology sector.

Dawn, supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will vastly increase the country's AI and simulation compute capacity for both fundamental research and industrial use, accelerating research discovery and driving growth within the UK knowledge economy. It is expected to drive significant advancements in healthcare, green fusion energy development and climate modelling.

Dawn Phase 1 and the already announced Isambard AI supercomputer at the 探花直播 of Bristol will join to form the AI Research Resource (AIRR), a UK national facility to help researchers maximise the potential of AI and support critical work into the potential and safe use of the technology.

Dr Paul Calleja, Director of Research Computing Services at the 探花直播 of Cambridge, said: 鈥淒awn Phase 1 represents a huge step forward in AI and simulation capability for the UK, deployed and ready to use now. Dawn was born from an innovative co-design partnership between 探花直播 of Cambridge, UKAEA, Dell Technologies and Intel.

鈥� 探花直播Phase 1 system plays an important role within a larger context, where this co-design activity is hoped to continue, aiming to deliver a Phase 2 supercomputer in 2024 which will boast 10 times the level of performance. If taken forward, Dawn Phase 2 would significantly boost the UK AI capability and continue this successful industry partnership.鈥�

World-leading technical teams from the 探花直播, Intel and Dell Technologies built Dawn, which harnesses the power of both AI and high-performance computing (HPC) to solve some of the world鈥檚 most challenging and pressing problems.

Announcing this investment at the聽AI聽Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan said: "Frontier聽AI聽models are becoming exponentially more powerful. At our聽AI聽Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, we have made it clear that Britain is grasping the opportunity to lead the world in adopting this technology safely so we can put it to work and lead healthier, easier and longer lives.

"This means giving Britain鈥檚 leading researchers and scientific talent access to the tools they need to delve into how this complicated technology works. That is why we are investing in building UK鈥檚 supercomputers, making sure we cement our place as a world-leader in聽AI聽safety."

Professor Emily Shuckburgh, Director of Cambridge Zero and the Institute of Computing for Climate Science said: 鈥� 探花直播coupling of AI and simulation methods is a growing and increasingly essential part of climate research. It is central to data-driven predictions and equation discovery, both of which are at the fore in climate science.

鈥淭his incredible new resource 鈥� Dawn 鈥� at Cambridge will enable software engineers and researchers at the Institute of Computing for Climate Science to accelerate their work helping to address the global challenges associated with climate change.鈥�

Dawn brings the UK closer to reaching the compute threshold of a quintillion floating point operations per second 鈥� one exaflop, better known as exascale. For perspective: every person on earth would have to make calculations 24 hours a day for more than four years to equal a second鈥檚 worth of processing power in an exascale system.

Hosted at Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab鈥檚 site, Dawn is the fastest AI supercomputer deployed in the UK today and will support some of the UK鈥檚 largest-ever workloads across both academic research and industrial domains. Importantly, it is the UK's first step on the road to developing future Exascale system.

Adam Roe, EMEA HPC technical director at Intel, said: 鈥淒awn considerably strengthens the scientific and AI compute capability available in the UK, and it鈥檚 on the ground, operational today at the Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab.

鈥淚鈥檓 very excited to see the sorts of early science this machine can deliver and continue to strengthen the Open Zettascale Lab partnership between Dell Technologies, Intel and the 探花直播 of Cambridge, and further broaden that to the UK scientific and AI community.鈥�

Tariq Hussain, Head of UK Public Sales, Dell Technologies, said: "Collaborations like [this one], alongside strong inward investment, are vital if we want compute to unlock the high-growth AI potential of the UK. It is paramount that the government invests in the right technologies and infrastructure to ensure the UK leads in AI and exascale-class simulation capability.

鈥淚t's also important to embrace the full spectrum of the technology ecosystem, including GPU diversity, to ensure customers can tackle the growing demands of generative AI, industrial simulation modelling and ground-breaking scientific research."

Dr Rob Akers, Director of Computing Programmes & Senior Fellow at UKAEA, added: 鈥淒awn will form an essential part of a diverse UKRI supercomputing ecosystem, helping to promote high-fidelity simulation and AI capability ensuring that UK science and engineering is first in the queue to exploit the latest innovation in disruptive HPC hardware. In the short term, Dawn will allow UKAEA鈥檚 fusion energy programme to form a powerful and exciting cross-Atlantic partnership with US labs exploiting the new 2ExaFlop AURORA supercomputer at Argonne, Dawn's 鈥榖ig sister鈥�.

鈥淔usion has long been referred to as an 鈥榚xascale grand challenge鈥�. 探花直播exascale is finally upon us and I firmly believe that the many collaborations coalescing around Dawn will be a powerful ingredient for extracting value promised by the exascale 鈥� for the UK to deliver fusion power to grid in the 2040s, to realise Net Zero more generally, to seed high value UK jobs in AI and 鈥榙igital鈥� and to drive economic growth across the entire United Kingdom.鈥�

探花直播Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab is hosting Dawn, the UK鈥檚 fastest artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer, which has been built by the 探花直播 of Cambridge Research Computing Services, Intel and Dell Technologies.

Dawn Phase 1 represents a huge step forward in AI and simulation capability for the UK, deployed and ready to use now

Paul Calleja

Joe Bishop

Dr Paul Calleja, Director of Dawn AI Service (left) and Professor Richard McMahon, Chair of Cambridge Research Computing Advisory Group and UKRI Dawn Principal Investigator (right) in front of Dawn.

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探花直播 of Cambridge - Dell Technologies

Ambitious goals for Dawn 鈥� the UK's fastest AI supercomputer

Cambridge, Intel and Dell join forces on UK鈥檚 fastest AI supercomputer