The UK’s fastest-ever supercomputer has now gone online and is already working to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing humanity, including green energy and climate change.
Named Dawn, the supercomputer is the first of a planned pair that will combine to make British AI supercomputing 30 times more powerful.
Dawn is now up and running at a specialist data centre in Bristol, while its twin machine, Isambard, will be built in Bristol.
The bespoke design makes use of more than 1,000 top-end Intel graphics processing units (GPUs) and stems from a collaboration between the Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab, Intel and Dell Technologies, with support from the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and UK Research & Innovation.
The pair are part of the government’s AI Research Resource, a national facility that aims to provide AI-specialised computing capacity to researchers and industry.
Dawn is now being used by researchers working on clean energy, personalised medicine and climate change, among other important fields.
Supercomputer working on development of fusion energy
One of the first major projects that the supercomputer is being put to work on is the development of fusion power for the UKAEA’s prototype power plant.
Fusion energy uses the same process as stars, including our sun, packing hydrogen nuclei so tightly together that they fuse, releasing huge amounts of energy in the process.
Theoretically, this could lead to the production of limitless green energy, but the process presents some huge challenges.
Dr Rob Akers, director of Computing Programmes at the UKAEA, described the process of delivering reliable fusion energy as one of the biggest scientific and engineering challenges of our times, adding that it involved recreating the conditions of a star down on Earth.
The huge complexity of a fusion power plant needs to be designed virtually using AI and supercomputing – which is where Dawn comes in.
The supercomputer will use data collected over the next two decades to build ‘digital twin’ simulations that can model both the plant machinery and fusion dynamics.
This will play a large part in the eventual physical construction of the power plant, and the virtual models developed using Dawn will also have a number of other applications.
A connected ‘industrial metaverse’ will help engineers and designers without a background in AI or high-powered computing to solve challenges in a number of different projects.
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