World’s largest ARM-based supercomputer to be built in Bristol

April 5, 2017 by
Filed under: News 
The University of Bristol is leading a £3m project to build the world’s largest ARM-based supercomputer. Isambard is being developed by researchers at Bristol, Bath, Cardiff and Exeter along with the Met Office and super computer maker Cray, which has its European headquarters and research centre in Bristol.
This will be one of the world’s first systems to be based on the Vulcan server-class chip being developed by Broadcom, which also has a software development centre in Bristol. Details of this device are still under wraps, but it promises much more memory bandwidth rather than higher peak performance, making it very attractive for researchers around the country tackling big problems.

“Isambard is an exciting experiment,” said project leader Simon McIntosh-Smith, Professor of High Performance Computing at the University of Bristol. “If we discover that ARM processors are competitive in HPC, then Isambard could be the first of a new generation of ARM-based supercomputers, ushering in an era of wider architectural choice, with greater opportunities for differentiation between supercomputer vendors. These outcomes should mean that scientists can choose systems more highly optimised to solve their problem, delivering even more exciting scientific breakthroughs at greater cost effectiveness than ever before.”

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