The Isambard 2 supercomputer will put a new type of processor—originally designed for the world’s fastest machine in Japan—into the hands of UK researchers. Most supercomputers rely on conventional CPUs, but the next generation of “exascale” machines (capable of a billion billion calculations per second) will need radically different hardware. The A64fx processor used in Isambard 2 combines the memory speed of a graphics card with the programmability of a standard chip, making it a testbed for future architectures. The project also expands a “multi-architecture comparison system” that lets scientists run the same code on different processors side by side, revealing which design works best for a given problem. If successful, Isambard 2 will help UK researchers prepare their software for exascale systems before those machines arrive. This matters for fields that depend on massive computation: climate modelling, drug discovery, materials design, and fluid dynamics for aircraft or energy systems. The system also provides a path for smaller university groups to move their codes up from local clusters to national facilities. The work is primarily infrastructure—enabling fundamental and applied science rather than conducting it directly—but without such testbeds, the UK risks falling behind in the global race to harness exascale computing.
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This proposal, led by Bristol, is from the Consortium behind the successful Isambard Tier-2 HPC service [1]: the GW4 Alliance of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter, in partnership with Cray and the Met Office. Isambard delivered the world's first production, Arm-based HPC service, creating significant impact for the world-wide HPC community in the process. The Isambard 2 project aims to build on this success, adding the next generation of exciting, Exascale-enabling, Arm-based technologies (Fujitsu's A64fx), while significantly expanding and upgrading the current service to meet growing demand. The A64fx CPU is generating excitement because it delivers memory bandwidth and floating point capability that is more like a GPU than a CPU (approximately 1 TeraByte/s and 3 TeraFLOP/s double precision, respectively). Providing access to these transformational technologies in parallel with an expanded Arm-based production system as a national service would be extremely advantageous to the UK's HPC community, supporting the porting and optimising of codes for future Exascale systems (the Fugaku system at RIKEN in Japan is just one example known to be based on A64fx). The Isambard 2 system will also provide one of the world's most comprehensive Multi Architecture Comparison System (MACS), significantly expanding the successful Isambard 1 MACS. The ability to compare next generation technologies with a constantly updated set of best-in-class CPUs and GPUs is a crucial part of any scientifically rigorous architectural evaluation. Being a Cray system, we will continue to uniquely offer their class-leading software toolchain to the Tier-2 community, a crucial capability to enable upward mobility from Tier-3 through Tier-2 to Tier-1. [1] https://gw4-isambard.github.io/docs/
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