The University of Edinburgh will receive a new £31m wing to house the exascale machine, with work on the project anticipated to start in 2025.
The first exascale supercomputer will be hosted by the University of Edinburgh, 英国政府已经证实. 这 下一代计算系统 will be able to handle at least a quintillion (or, a billion billion) calculations per second and be 50 times faster than the current generation of supercomputers currently running in the UK.
Exascale computing has become the latest battleground in the race for global compute dominance, with the US becoming the first country to successfully build an exascale supercomputer in 2022. 名为“前沿” and housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 这台机器由9个部件组成,400 AMD-powered nodes and 90 miles of networking cables, 允许它在1处运行.1 exaflop.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced plans to invest in high-performance computing power ahead of the government’s 春季预算 今年早些时候. 这 funding boost has already backed the construction of a 9亿英镑的人工智能超级计算机 in Bristol in addition to the new exascale general purpose machine bound for Edinburgh.
The University of Edinburgh already hosts a supercomputing centre and this will be expanded as part of the new £31m national exascale facility. The new supercomputing system will be funded by the Department for Innovation, 科学 and Technology (DSIT) and include chips and components built by British companies. The manufacturers and designers have not been revealed yet, but Sunak said that future computing projects funded by the government would include domestically manufactured chips.
Exascale machines are built to carry out complex functions at faster speeds and with more precision than the current generation of supercomputers. 在时间, it is hoped that the construction of these much larger and more powerful machines will allow researchers and companies to facilitate new breakthroughs in the fields of AI, 医学, 核聚变, 化学, 气候变化.
英国目前的国家超级计算机, ARCHER2, is run at the University of Edinburgh by EPCC (formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre) and came online in November 2021. The machine has a peak performance of 28 petaflops, 也就是每秒280亿次计算, 自夸750,000核, 包括7,742 AMD EPYC 64核处理器. The HPE Cray EX system cost £79m and is 10 billion times faster than the first Cray supercomputer built in 1964.
The new, as yet unnamed exascale machine will also be operated by EPCC. The first installation phase is expected to begin in 2025, though it remains unclear as to when the machine will be fully operational. “These supercomputers are immensely complex systems, and we’ll use everything we’ve learnt over the past 30 years to run the best possible service for our thousands of users from across the UK’s scientific and industrial research communities,EPCC主任说, 马克·帕森斯教授.
科学, Innovation and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan said exascale machines are required to keep the UK as a global leader in scientific discovery and innovation. Donelan argued that the investment “will provide British researchers with an ultra-fast, versatile resource to support pioneering work into 人工智能安全, life-saving drugs, and clean low-carbon energy.”
UK Research and Innovation Chief Executive Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser added that state-of-the-art compute infrastructure is critical to unlock advances in research and innovation including drug design and energy security. “下一阶段的投资,雷瑟说, “will help to keep the UK at the forefront of emerging technologies and facilitate the collaborations needed to explore and develop game-changing insights across disciplines.”
As well as plans for three exascale machines across the US, the European Union is also heavily investing in this new generation of supercomputing machine. EuroHPC is leading the EU project and the first machine will be built at the Julich Supercomputing Centre in Germany for an estimated €500m. 木星命名, it is expected to be up and running by mid-2024 with more than two exaflops of processing power available.