University of Cambridge teams up with Dell to develop UK's fastest artificial intelligence supercomputer

With the vigorous development of global scientific research, the requirements for supercomputers and supercomputing software are getting higher and higher, and countries have gradually increased their investment in the research and development of higher-performance supercomputers. In 2022, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States built the world's first exascale supercomputer, kicking off the global exascale supercomputing competition. On the eve of the Supercomputing Conference, Cambridge University, a famous British university, announced that Dawn Phase 1 of the supercomputer manufactured in cooperation with Dell, UKAEA, and Intel will be put into use, marking the beginning of the exascale supercomputing era in the UK

As the UK’s first step on the road to developing future exascale systems, Dawn will support the UK’s largest-ever workloads across academic research and industry for applications including health insurance, engineering, Green fusion energy, climate modelling, and cutting-edge science in cosmology and high-energy physics. As the UK's first step in the development of future exascale systems, Dawn will support the UK's largest academic research and industrial workloads in history. These areas include health insurance, engineering, green fusion energy, climate modeling, and cutting-edge scientific fields such as cosmology and high-energy physics

University of Cambridge X Dell

Jointly build the fastest supercomputer in the UK

The University of Cambridge and Dell have extensive experience in cooperation in the field of supercomputing. For example, the University of Cambridge successfully built the supercomputer "Cumulus-British Science Cloud" in 2019, which ranked first on the Virtual Institute's 2019 I/O-500 list. In addition, the three supercomputer systems built by the University of Cambridge also performed well on the 2021 ISC Green500 list, contributing to the rapid development of supercomputers in the UK. As the first part of the UK's Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (AIRR) initiative, the newly announced Dawn will become the UK's largest public computing cluster

Artificial Intelligence Research Resources (AIRR) Program: The British government announced a £10 billion investment in March this year to provide world-leading artificial intelligence professional computing capabilities to public researchers, academia and industry. As of November this year, £30 billion has been invested

The Dawn system is based on the Dell PowerEdge XE9640 server. Thanks to Dell's liquid cooling technology and multi-functional configuration, the server system can handle high-performance AI and HPC workloads well:

● Capable of 100% direct liquid cooling of CPUs and GPUs (as well as some other minor components), efficiently cooling data centers and HPC cluster operations.

● Density-optimized servers built specifically for AI, unlocking the potential of planning and delivering real-time insights.

●Up to 32 DDR5 memory RDIMM slots, 4 drives and 4 PCle Gen5 expansion slots for effective expansion.

Built-in security features such as SCV and Silicon Root of Trust make the deployment of artificial intelligence operations more secure

In terms of software, HPC supports British SME StackHPC’s Scientific OpenStack, which can provide a fully artificial intelligence and simulation-optimized cloud supercomputing software environment. This, combined with the oneAPI open software ecosystem and optimization framework, helps developers accelerate AI and HPC workloads and enhance code portability across multiple hardware architectures

With the announcement of the commissioning of Dawn Phase 1, Rob Akers, Director of Computing Programs and Senior Researcher at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), said:

Dawn will form an important part of the diverse UKRI supercomputing ecosystem, helping to promote high-fidelity simulation and artificial intelligence capabilities, ensuring UK science and engineering are the first to take advantage of the latest innovations in disruptive HPC hardware. Nuclear fusion has long been called the ‘grand exascale challenge’. Exascale is finally here, and I firmly believe that the many collaborations surrounding Dwan will be a powerful factor in extracting the value that exascale promises.

Rich supercomputing system support experience

In order to promote the development of human scientific research

After years of deep cultivation in the HPC field, Dell has rich experience in supercomputing system support. In addition to many collaborations with the University of Cambridge, we also designed and manufactured Frontera for the Texas Supercomputing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin, provided the Great Lakes computing cluster for the University of Michigan, provided HPC5 for Eni, and provided HPC5 for Simon Canada. Fraser University provides support for Cedar (GPU) clusters

Supercomputer systems have been applied in many fields such as simulation, modeling, artificial intelligence, data science, genomics, fossil energy research and development, and medical care. They have widely promoted the development of human scientific research

Dawn Phase 1 represents an important step forward in the UK’s artificial intelligence and simulation capabilities. The project is innovatively designed by the University of Cambridge, UKAEA, Dell Technologies and Intel to inject new vitality into the UK's technological development. The Phase 1 system is an important part of the larger context, and this collaborative design activity will continue in the future, with plans to launch a Phase 2 supercomputer in 2024 with 10 times higher performance. If all goes well, Dawn Phase 2 will significantly increase the UK's AI capabilities and continue successful industry partnerships

The rewritten content is:——Dr. Paul Calleja

The Director of Research Computing Services at the University of Cambridge is the person responsible for managing and delivering research computing resources

The content that needs to be rewritten is: summary part

Help to achieve this goal is provided by Dell Technologies, which provides artificial intelligence and high-performance computing support to the University of Cambridge to build the UK’s fastest artificial intelligence supercomputer. This cooperation lays the foundation for the UK's technological position and provides further assistance for the UK's first commercial nuclear fusion power plant in the 2040s. As the world's leading digital solutions provider, Dell Technologies will continue to adhere to its belief in technological innovation and use technology to assist human scientific research and development

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