Nvidia And HPE Unveil Isambard 3 Supercomputer

Nvidia is making more Superchips that have two CPUs or a CPU and a GPU. They have made an HPE European supercomputer called Isambard 3. The supercomputer uses their Grace CPU Superchips. It will be in the UK. The announcement happened at the ISC 2023 conference in Hamburg.

Isambard 3 has 384 Nvidia Grace CPU Superchips and Isambard Kingdom Brunel is pictured on the cabinets. It will have 2.7 petaflops of FP64 peak performance. The system will use less than 270 kilowatts of power, making it one of the world's three greenest non-accelerated supercomputers.

Competition for the title of most efficient non-accelerated supercomputer is not very intense. Fugaku system currently holds the top spot with 15.42 gigaflops per watt. The Henri system, which features Nvidia's H100 GPU, holds the overall top spot on the Green500 with 65.40 gigaflops per watt. CPU-based systems will still be created, and improvements in efficiency are always appreciated.

Ian Buck, VP of Nvidia, said it's important for computing to use energy-efficient tech. Nvidia is working with Arm Neoverse to make more efficient supercomputing centers and make breakthroughs in research. Climate change is a big problem.

Isambard 3 will serve the GW4 Alliance, which includes four UK universities. The University of Bristol is leading the project. Isambard 3 is Arm-based, like its predecessors. Isambard 1 was marketed as the world's first production 64-bit Arm supercomputer. Isambard 2 had 336 nodes and was also based on Cray systems. Isambard 3 continues the lineage of Cray systems.

Isambard 3 is set to be way more efficient than the previous model. Nvidia thinks it'll be six times better. Simon McIntosh-Smith is the boss of the Isambard project. He says the Grace CPU is the reason it's so much better.

Isambard 3 is designed for a variety of uses. These include climate science, AI, life sciences, medicine, astrophysics, biotech, and energy. Nvidia mentioned that Isambard 2 is currently being used for research on Parkinson's disease, osteoporosis, and Covid.

The release date for Isambard 3 is set for spring 2024.

Nvidia has a new system called Superchips. They are hyping up several Superchips. One of them is the Grace Hopper Superchip in the Alps Swiss supercomputing infrastructure. Another is the Venado system at Los Alamos National Laboratory. There will also be a Grace CPU Superchip in the MareNostrum 5. Additionally, the Grace Hopper Superchip will be in the Shaheen III supercomputer at KAUST.

We don't know anything about the Arm/Nvidia-based supercomputer. It was announced before Nvidia tried to buy Arm. It was supposed to be in Cambridge at Arm's headquarters. When asked about the supercomputer, Nvidia didn't say anything.