̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Intel

Ambitious goals for Dawn – the UK's fastest AI supercomputer

lw355 — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 06:30:12 +0000

Dawn is now being deployed for use by scientists within Cambridge and across the UK to support ambitious goals in clean energy, personalised medicine and climate.

Cambridge, Intel and Dell join forces on UK’s fastest AI supercomputer

cjb250 — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 10:51:14 +0000

Dawn has been created via a highly innovative long-term co-design partnership between the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, UK Research & Innovation, the UK Atomic Energy Authority and global tech leaders Intel and Dell Technologies. This partnership brings highly valuable technology first-mover status and inward investment into the UK technology sector.

Dawn, supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will vastly increase the country's AI and simulation compute capacity for both fundamental research and industrial use, accelerating research discovery and driving growth within the UK knowledge economy. It is expected to drive significant advancements in healthcare, green fusion energy development and climate modelling.

Dawn Phase 1 and the already announced Isambard AI supercomputer at the ̽��ֱ�� of Bristol will join to form the AI Research Resource (AIRR), a UK national facility to help researchers maximise the potential of AI and support critical work into the potential and safe use of the technology.

Dr Paul Calleja, Director of Research Computing Services at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “Dawn Phase 1 represents a huge step forward in AI and simulation capability for the UK, deployed and ready to use now. Dawn was born from an innovative co-design partnership between ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, UKAEA, Dell Technologies and Intel.

“ ̽��ֱ��Phase 1 system plays an important role within a larger context, where this co-design activity is hoped to continue, aiming to deliver a Phase 2 supercomputer in 2024 which will boast 10 times the level of performance. If taken forward, Dawn Phase 2 would significantly boost the UK AI capability and continue this successful industry partnership.”

World-leading technical teams from the ̽��ֱ��, Intel and Dell Technologies built Dawn, which harnesses the power of both AI and high-performance computing (HPC) to solve some of the world’s most challenging and pressing problems.

Announcing this investment at the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan said: "Frontier AI models are becoming exponentially more powerful. At our AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, we have made it clear that Britain is grasping the opportunity to lead the world in adopting this technology safely so we can put it to work and lead healthier, easier and longer lives.

"This means giving Britain’s leading researchers and scientific talent access to the tools they need to delve into how this complicated technology works. That is why we are investing in building UK’s supercomputers, making sure we cement our place as a world-leader in AI safety."

Professor Emily Shuckburgh, Director of Cambridge Zero and the Institute of Computing for Climate Science said: “ ̽��ֱ��coupling of AI and simulation methods is a growing and increasingly essential part of climate research. It is central to data-driven predictions and equation discovery, both of which are at the fore in climate science.

“This incredible new resource – Dawn – at Cambridge will enable software engineers and researchers at the Institute of Computing for Climate Science to accelerate their work helping to address the global challenges associated with climate change.”

Dawn brings the UK closer to reaching the compute threshold of a quintillion floating point operations per second – one exaflop, better known as exascale. For perspective: every person on earth would have to make calculations 24 hours a day for more than four years to equal a second’s worth of processing power in an exascale system.

Hosted at Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab’s site, Dawn is the fastest AI supercomputer deployed in the UK today and will support some of the UK’s largest-ever workloads across both academic research and industrial domains. Importantly, it is the UK's first step on the road to developing future Exascale system.

Adam Roe, EMEA HPC technical director at Intel, said: “Dawn considerably strengthens the scientific and AI compute capability available in the UK, and it’s on the ground, operational today at the Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab.

“I’m very excited to see the sorts of early science this machine can deliver and continue to strengthen the Open Zettascale Lab partnership between Dell Technologies, Intel and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and further broaden that to the UK scientific and AI community.”

Tariq Hussain, Head of UK Public Sales, Dell Technologies, said: "Collaborations like [this one], alongside strong inward investment, are vital if we want compute to unlock the high-growth AI potential of the UK. It is paramount that the government invests in the right technologies and infrastructure to ensure the UK leads in AI and exascale-class simulation capability.

“It's also important to embrace the full spectrum of the technology ecosystem, including GPU diversity, to ensure customers can tackle the growing demands of generative AI, industrial simulation modelling and ground-breaking scientific research."

Dr Rob Akers, Director of Computing Programmes & Senior Fellow at UKAEA, added: “Dawn will form an essential part of a diverse UKRI supercomputing ecosystem, helping to promote high-fidelity simulation and AI capability ensuring that UK science and engineering is first in the queue to exploit the latest innovation in disruptive HPC hardware. In the short term, Dawn will allow UKAEA’s fusion energy programme to form a powerful and exciting cross-Atlantic partnership with US labs exploiting the new 2ExaFlop AURORA supercomputer at Argonne, Dawn's ‘big sister’.

“Fusion has long been referred to as an ‘exascale grand challenge’. ̽��ֱ��exascale is finally upon us and I firmly believe that the many collaborations coalescing around Dawn will be a powerful ingredient for extracting value promised by the exascale – for the UK to deliver fusion power to grid in the 2040s, to realise Net Zero more generally, to seed high value UK jobs in AI and ‘digital’ and to drive economic growth across the entire United Kingdom.”

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab is hosting Dawn, the UK’s fastest artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer, which has been built by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Research Computing Services, Intel and Dell Technologies.

Dawn Phase 1 represents a huge step forward in AI and simulation capability for the UK, deployed and ready to use now

Paul Calleja

Joe Bishop

Dr Paul Calleja, Director of Dawn AI Service (left) and Professor Richard McMahon, Chair of Cambridge Research Computing Advisory Group and UKRI Dawn Principal Investigator (right) in front of Dawn.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology named Intel oneAPI Center of Excellence

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 04:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��oneAPI Center of Excellence will focus on advancing cosmological research, open-source code development, and in situ compute and visualisation, as well as teaching computational and visualisation coding techniques.

̽��ֱ��Centre for Theoretical Cosmology was established by Professor Stephen Hawking in 2007 within the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. It exists to advance the scientific understanding of our universe, developing and testing mathematical theories for cosmology and black holes.

Over the past six years, Hawking CTC Director Professor Paul Shellard and the COSMOS computing team have collaborated with Intel on developing and optimising several codes with many simulations and visualization results for cosmology study. This includes areas such as the analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), simulations of Einstein’s General Relativity and the creation of gravitational waves during black hole or boson star collisions, and by cosmic string networks.

̽��ֱ��COSMOS team, its work and computational and visualisation discoveries together with Intel were documented in the Discovery+ “UNIVERSE UNRAVELED” series currently available in select countries, including the UK.

A major goal of the Hawking CTC is to continue Professor Hawking’s vision of confronting our models of the Universe with the latest observations to reveal deep connections between quantum and galactic scales, while explaining such discoveries in ways understandable by everyone. Hawking recognised that this high-precision data and our complex theories can only touch each other using powerful computers.

“We are honoured to be among the vanguard of institutions chosen to be an Intel oneAPI Center of Excellence, ensuring we build on our longstanding collaboration on in situ visualisation and code modernisation as we prepare to study the Universe at exascale,” said Shellard. “We’re committed to flexible platform-independent programming paradigms so that we can do more with fewer people, focusing on trying out new ideas and new algorithms for our cosmology workflows. ̽��ֱ��oneAPI development tools offer us a fast pathway on to the widest range of HPC architectures, especially the latest GPU accelerators, so we can respond to the flood of new cosmological data sooner.”

“Intel is pleased to extend the highly impactful work done by the Hawking CTC Intel Graphics and Visualization Institute by adding the centre to our growing family of Intel oneAPI Centers of Excellence,” said Jim Jeffers, senior principal engineer and senior director of Intel Advanced Rendering and Visualization. “As part of this program, the Hawking CTC can take full advantage of state-of-the-art software development tools and advanced CPUs and GPUs to break new ground in understanding our universe. This honours the legacy of Stephen Hawking and his passion, vision, and goal to answer the ultimate questions of our existence, our past and our future.”

̽��ֱ��Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology (Hawking CTC) at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is expanding its Intel Graphics and Visualization Institute of Xellence (Intel GVI) to an Intel oneAPI Center of Excellence, which will help expand our understanding of the universe.

Amelia Drew (CTC, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge) and Carson Brownlee (Intel Advanced Visualisation and Rendering)

Visualisation of radiation from a cosmic string network created with the help of the Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Professor Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday public symposium

gm349 — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:59:27 +0000

To coincide with Professor Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, in conjunction with Intel, is hosting a public symposium on Sunday, 08 January entitled ‘ ̽��ֱ��State of the Universe’.

Speakers will include Professor Hawking, the Astronomer Royal Lord (Martin) Rees, Professor Saul Perlmutter ( ̽��ֱ�� of California, Berkeley, 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics), and one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists Professor Kip Thorne (California Institute of Technology).

2 - 6pm, Sunday 08 January 2012

Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Site

Cambridge CB3 9DA

Free tickets for the symposium are unfortunately no longer available.

However, for those unable to attend, the symposium will be webcast live. Please visit: https://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/hawking70/multimedia.html

In addition to the symposium, a scientific conference (which is already fully booked) will be held earlier in the week (05-07 January). A major goal of the conference will be to review the current status of the fields of black holes, cosmology and fundamental physics; the 27 invited speakers are all world leaders in these fields. Additional information regarding the conference can be found at the following website: https://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/stephen70/

Symposium will focus on ‘ ̽��ֱ��State of the Universe’.

Photo Philip Waterson, LBIPP, LRPS

Professor Stephen Hawking

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