The rise of Dawn: How the UK’s fastest AI supercomputer is supporting goals in clean energy, personalised medicine and climate.
At the world’s first AI Safety Summit, hosted by the UK in November 2023, the government announced investment that would make British AI supercomputing 30 times more powerful, thanks to a pair of supercomputers named Dawn and Isambard.
The supercomputers Dawn and Isambard, based respectively in Cambridge and Bristol, are part of the government’s AI Research Resource. These national facilities will underpin the UK’s next-generation AI infrastructure, providing AI-specialised compute capacity to researchers, academia and industry. Now up and running in its state-of-the-art Data Centre in Cambridge, Dawn is currently the most powerful AI supercomputer in the UK, with more than a thousand top-end Intel graphics processing units (GPUs) operating inside its server stacks.
The supercomputer’s bespoke innovations in hardware and software result from a long-term co-design partnership between the Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab, directed by Dr Paul Calleja, and global tech leaders Intel and Dell Technologies, with support from the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and UK Research & Innovation. Dawn is now being deployed for use by scientists within Cambridge and across the UK in critical research fields such as clean energy, personalised medicine and climate.
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Dawn Supercomputer: The race for fusion energy
“Dawn will create new digital worlds so that complex problems can be simulated, tested and solved at speed. This is a new era for UK compute,” Dr Paul Calleja, Director of Research Computing Services
UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) scientists and engineers are using Dawn to design the UK’s prototype fusion energy power plant, paving the way for accelerating the use of fusion energy in the UK. Fusion is the natural process that powers our Sun. The immense force of gravity in the Sun’s core causes hydrogen nuclei to pack together so tightly that they ‘fuse’, releasing staggering amounts of energy. If fusion can be harnessed economically on Earth, it will provide a near-limitless form of clean, safe electricity.
“However, delivering fusion energy is one of the biggest scientific and engineering challenges of current times,” says Dr Rob Akers, Director of Computing Programmes at UKAEA. “A fusion power plant is a very strongly coupled, very complex piece of machinery – it has to be to contain the conditions of a star down here on Earth.
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