In a groundbreaking collaboration, Dell Technologies, Intel, and the University of Cambridge proudly announce the launch of Dawn Phase 1, the fastest AI supercomputer in the United Kingdom. This cutting-edge supercomputer, developed by leading technical teams, leverages the synergy of artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) to address global challenges.

The deployment of Dawn marks a significant milestone for the U.K.'s technological prowess, setting a clear path for future leadership in technology and attracting investments into the country's technology sector. Dawn is a key component of the recently initiated U.K. AI Research Resource (AIRR), dedicated to exploring the feasibility of associated systems and architectures.

Dawn catapults the U.K. closer to achieving exascale computing, with a goal to reach a compute threshold of one quintillion (10^18) floating-point operations per second—an exaflop. To put this in perspective, it would take every person on Earth more than four years of non-stop calculations to match a single second's worth of processing power in an exascale system.

Adam Roe, EMEA HPC Technical Director at Intel, expressed his enthusiasm, stating, "Dawn considerably strengthens the scientific and AI compute capability available in the U.K." The supercomputer, operational at the Cambridge Open Zettascale Lab, utilizes Dell PowerEdge XE9640 servers hosting the Intel Data Center GPU Max Series accelerator. This configuration not only delivers uncompromised performance but also provides flexibility through oneAPI, expanding the ecosystem of choices.

Dawn, a product of the collaborative efforts of Dell Technologies, Intel, and the University of Cambridge, with additional investment from UK Research and Innovation, is now the fastest AI supercomputer deployed in the U.K. It is poised to support unprecedented workloads in academic research and industrial applications, spanning domains such as healthcare, engineering, green fusion energy, climate modeling, and cutting-edge research in cosmology and high-energy physics. The deployment of Dawn reinforces the commitment to advancing scientific and AI capabilities in the U.K. and opens new avenues for collaboration within the scientific and AI community.