(AGENPARL) – mer 01 novembre 2023 [BEIS News]01 Nov 2023
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TECH SEC ANNOUNCES INVESTMENT BOOST TO MAKE BRITISH AI SUPERCOMPUTING THIRTY TIMES MORE POWERFUL
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* British supercomputing to be boosted thirty-fold with a new Cambridge computer and Bristol site.
* The two computers will form the Government’s “AI Research Resource”, which helps researchers discover how to make the most advanced models of AI safe and drive other breakthroughs.
* This comes as the UK opens its AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, to consider the risks of AI and discuss their mitigation through international action.
The Government’s Frontier AI Taskforce and leading British researchers will be equipped with cutting edge supercomputers to analyse the safety of advanced AI models, thanks to new investment in the “AI Research Resource”.
The tool will build and connect two new supercomputers across the UK, giving researchers access to resources with more than thirty-times the capacity of the UK’s current largest public AI computing tools. They will be able to use the machines, which will be running from summer 2024, to analyse advanced AI models to test safety features and drive breakthroughs in drug discovery and clean energy.
The investment into the AI Research Resource has been tripled to £300 million, up from £100m announced in September, in a bid to further boost UK AI capabilities.
This will bolster Isambard-AI, which will be Britain’s most advanced computer and based at the University of Bristol, is set to be ten times faster than the UK’s current quickest machine.
The investment will also connect Isambard-AI to a newly announced Cambridge supercomputer called “Dawn”. This computer – delivered through a partnership with Dell and UK SME StackHPC – will be powered by over 1000 Intel chips that use water-cooling to reduce power consumption. It is set to be running in the next two months and target breakthroughs in fusion energy, healthcare and climate modelling.
Chaired by Ian Hogarth, the Frontier AI Taskforce will have priority access to the connected computing tools to support its work to mitigate the risks posed by the most advanced forms of AI, including national security from the development of bioweapons and cyberattacks.
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.
The supercomputer, ten times faster than the UK’s current fastest machine, will deliver over 200 ‘petaflops’, meaning it can make 200,000,000,000,000,000 calculations (that’s two hundred quadrillion) every second. By comparison, the newest smartphones today deliver only trillions of calculations per second.
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