Dawn Rising: Jumpstarting a new age of AI supercomputing in the U.K.

In November 2023, the Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab announced the deployment of the U.K.’s fastest AI supercomputer: Dawn Phase 1.¹ Powered by the latest Intel GPUs and CPUs aboard liquid-cooled Dell servers, the Dawn supercomputer combines breakthrough artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced high-performance computing (HPC) technology to help researchers solve the world’s most complex challenges

Accelerating breakthrough

Dawn vastly increases the U.K.’s AI and simulation compute capacity and supports some of the largest-ever computing workloads for scientific, industrial, and academic research applications. It’s expected to drive discoveries and advancements across a wide range of compute-intensive research areas—from bioscience to fusion energy and climate modeling. 

“The coupling of AI and simulation methods is a growing and increasingly essential part of climate research,” said Professor Emily Shuckburgh, Director of Cambridge Zero and the Institute of Computing for Climate Science. “Dawn, an incredible new resource at Cambridge, will enable software engineers and researchers at the Institute of Computing for Climate Science to accelerate their work addressing the global challenges associated with climate change.”

Collaborating on the future

Dawn was developed from an innovative co-design partnership among the University of Cambridge, the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Dell Technologies, and Intel. 

“Dawn considerably strengthens the scientific and AI compute capability available in the U.K., and it’s on the ground, operational today at the Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab,” said Adam Roe, EMEA HPC technical director at Intel. “I’m excited to see the types of early science this machine can deliver and continue to strengthen the Open Zettascale Lab partnership.” 

The technology enabling this powerhouse

The Dawn Phase 1 supercomputer runs 512 4^th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and 1,024 Intel® Data Center GPU Max 1550 accelerators on 256 Dell PowerEdge XE9640 server nodes. These Intel Max Series GPUs are Intel’s highest density processor, packing over 100 billion transistors into a 47-tile package and offering up to 128 gigabytes of high bandwidth memory. In addition, innovative direct liquid cooling (DLC) technology built into the Dell PowerEdge XE9640 servers gives Dawn higher levels of compute density, performance per watt, and energy efficiency than traditional air-cooled HPC systems. In STAC-A2 benchmark testing, direct liquid cooling enabled the Dell PowerEdge XE9640 to cool over 3kW in a 2U form factor, offering 4.3x the space efficiency of an air-cooled HPC system and smashing the previous space-efficiency record by 2.3x.²

On the software side, UK SME StackHPC’s Scientific OpenStack provides Dawn with an AI- and simulation-optimized cloud supercomputing software environment. Dawn also uses the oneAPI open software ecosystem and frameworks to help developers rapidly optimize for AI and HPC workloads and ensure code portability.

Scaling up opportunities 10X-100X faster

Dr. Paul Calleja, Director of Research Computing Services at the University of Cambridge, explained how vital Dawn is for scientific research: “The U.K. needs leading-edge computational resources so that its research community can compete on the global stage. Nowadays, science uses simulation and AI as the main driving forces to accelerate that discovery process. Without the compute, without the AI capability, science is held back. With these capabilities, we can push the discovery process 10 times or 100 times faster than without them.”

The Dawn supercomputer also moves the country closer to reaching exascale computing—the compute threshold of a quintillion (10¹⁸) floating point operations per second. This level of compute is needed for ultracomplex simulations and calculations, allowing future revolutionary discoveries in physics, bioscience, climate science, and other crucial research. 

“Fusion has long been referred to as an exascale grand challenge,” said Dr. Rob Akers, Director of Computing Programmes & Senior Fellow at UKAEA. “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.” 

“I firmly believe that the many collaborations coalescing around Dawn will be a powerful ingredient for extracting value promised by the exascale – for the U.K. to deliver fusion power to the grid in the 2040s,” Dr. Akers added. 

Investing in the AI frontier

Dawn is only the beginning. At November’s AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, UK Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan announced the formation of the AI Research Resource (AIRR). This £300 million investment in AI innovation will pair Dawn with the Isambard-AI supercomputer at the University of Bristol to make a massive amount of AI-specialized HPC capacity available to public researchers, academia, and industry.

“Frontier AI models are becoming exponentially more powerful,” Secretary Donelan said in her announcement. “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 the U.K.’s supercomputers, ensuring we cement our place as a world leader in AI safety,” continued Secretary Donelan.

Planning for the next Dawn

As the name implies, Dawn Phase 1 is only the first step for the Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab’s AI supercomputer. Dawn Phase 2 promises to raise the bar for AI supercomputing in Great Britain even higher. 

“Dawn Phase 1 represents a huge step forward in AI and simulation capability for the U.K., deployed and ready to use now,” Dr. Calleja said. “We’ve got really fast results from the machine, so for a system straight out of the blocks, it’s working extremely well.” Dawn debuted at number 41 on the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers in November 2023.³ Dr. Calleja revealed that Cambridge, Dell, and Intel aim to deliver Dawn Phase 2—with 10 times higher AI compute performance—as soon as 2024. 

Tariq Hussain, Dell Technologies head of UK Public Sector sums up the importance and potential of these kinds of partnerships for the future of AI advancement: “Collaborations like [this one], alongside strong inward investment, are vital if we want compute to unlock the high-growth AI potential of the U.K. … 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 modeling and ground-breaking scientific research.” 

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^[1] Based on Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab’s own performance analysis compared to the TOP500 List June 2023, based on theoretical peak FP16 FLOPS throughput.

^[2] Dell Technologies, You Can Have Your GPU and Cool It Too, November 6, 2023, accessed December 2023.

^[3] TOP500 List November 2023