back to article UK's Isambard-AI super powers up as government goes AI crazy

Britain's beefiest supercomputer, Isambard-AI, is set to become fully operational this summer, as the government steps up its strategy to push AI everywhere as a driver for economic recovery. Announced about 18 months ago, Isambard-AI has been touted as a huge leap forward for AI compute power in the UK. Based on the HPE Cray …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "They worry about AI taking their jobs"

    No, I worry that you're betting big on a totally unproven, extremely expensive and power hungry technology that's unlikely to create more than a handful of jobs*.

    * And they'll mostly be estate agents trying to sell unused data centres that were built only the foundations of hopeless and uninformed optimism.

    1. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge

      Re: "They worry about AI taking their jobs"

      Hope they have the funding in place to cover the cost of running this

      1. MachDiamond Silver badge

        Re: "They worry about AI taking their jobs"

        "Hope they have the funding in place to cover the cost of running this"

        What's doubtful are any plans on what to do with it in 5 years when it's hopelessly obsolete.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "They worry about AI taking their jobs"

      I’m sure even WestminsterGPT would have got right ….

      - not cutting winter fuel payments for pensioners

      - found the £12m gap in funding that nixed the £1/4bn Astra-Zeneca Flu Vaccine factory expansion in Liverpool

      - not be spaffing billions in Carbon Capture and Storage pie in the sky

      - denied Heathrow/Gatwick airports expansion and eased congestion at those airports by helping the local authority in reopening mothballed Doncaster Robin Hood airport by moving some flights north- and avoided millions of unnecessary journeys to LHR/LGW by people north of Watford.’local airport for local people’.

      - not spaffed £500m subsidy for a JLR battery factory in Conservative Somerset sticks automotive manufacturing wasteland a hundred miles away from JLR’s factories - and would have built it on the vacant site in Coventry - over the road from JLR’s Global HQ and close to the UK’s Battery Industrialisation Innovation Lab

      - HS2 etc …

      - be properly funding Foreign Aid/BBC World Service instead of making weapons - kinda keeps furriners in foreign. ‘Soft power’ which UK good at.

      - have long ago taken water back into public ownership and tough shit to the investors

      - long ago have cut off weapons supply to Israel and imposed sanctions for ethnic cleaning (that’s anti-Zionism, not anti-semitism - ironic considering this year will be the 80th anniversary of the public exposure of the holocaust).

      1. ChrisElvidge Silver badge

        Re: BBC World Service

        About time the government realised (again) that the World Service is not (actually) part of the BBC, but part of the FCDO.

        BBC only runs it because FCDO has no news (or other) journalists. FCDO could then take input from BBC/ITN/Sky etc.

        FCDO should pay all costs, not lumping them onto the license fee.

        1. UnknownUnknown Silver badge

          Re: BBC World Service

          TBH keeping it part of the BBC helps with trust as it’s not part of the Government but at arms length run by a much loved organisation that has faults and isn’t perfect…. Much indirectly by fiscal squeeze and the constant attacks on them by the former Tory Government.

          FCDO can still pay for it though.

          Much in the same way I have far-far more faith in the xclwnt content from USA’s PBS/NPR than Voice of America etc.

  2. Tron Silver badge

    With Reform nipping at their ankles, any bandwagon will do.

    An entirely new sector for the British government to fail in, having failed in all the others.

    Caveat. I am not a Reform supporter. I despise them. Simply stating a fact. After over a decade of even worse governmental failure than is usual in the UK, you can be as bad as Reform and still stand a chance of getting elected if the voters are racist enough, xenophobic enough, gullible enough and managed to avoid learning anything at school.

    1. Grindslow_knoll

      Re: With Reform nipping at their ankles, any bandwagon will do.

      Agreed, but this doesn't buy votes back from Reform, perhaps more effective for soft support in lobbying and funding

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: With Reform nipping at their ankles, any bandwagon will do.

      It's really worrying that they're managing to dictate the political landscape despite having a tiny nber of MPs, councillors etc. they have a huge media presence and even bigger mouths.

    3. Aging Hippy
      Joke

      Re: With Reform nipping at their ankles, any bandwagon will do.

      Not a bandwagon but a chance of more rubbish spouting from The Forage. Put Isambard-AI through Reform's English to Bigottese translator (easy-read edition) and it becomes Islam-Ali.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: With Reform nipping at their ankles, any bandwagon will do.

      We might hope it's a tumbrel rather than their rancorous band wagon with plenty of room to transport the whole boiling to where they might have their debating forcibly terminated.

    5. ChrisElvidge Silver badge

      Re: With Reform nipping at their ankles, any bandwagon will do.

      Is it about time that "Labour rebels" (100? at last count) left Labour and founded a new worker-oriented party - a bit like when Labour was set up by the Trades Unions. Combined with the LibDems, they could then be HM's Opposition.

      1. Like a badger Silver badge

        Re: With Reform nipping at their ankles, any bandwagon will do.

        Good thinking Citizen Smith! But you'd need a name. I had a look at the parties who contested the last GE, and the Socialist Labour Party is already taken, Workers Party of Great Britain that's gone too. Socialist Worker's Party, yep, one already. Trade Union & Socialist Coalition, already here. Cross-Community Labour Alternative, owned, Socialist Equality Part, that's a thing. Socialist Party of Great Britain, them too.

        I suggest you either call your new party the People's Front of Judea, or the Tooting Popular Front.

        Of course, a splinter group of Labour dire-hards who hark back to the golden age of Harold Wilson will do about as well as any of those groups named, but it will keep its members busy.

    6. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: With Reform nipping at their ankles, any bandwagon will do.

      TBH more doubling down on Labour Principles and effective technocratic Government than racist-lite.

      For example improving the immigration/deportation system so that - with due process - illegal immigrants were visibly but lawfully (express) deported within 2-4 weeks maximum than languishing state supported for 12+ months etc would do more to deter than threatens Rwanda or smashing gangs. Spend the £bn’s there to sort it.

      Not opening the door to over a million culturally misaligned non-EU Willy-Nilly after closing the door to a couple of hundred thousand largely white Catholic European Heritage Poles a year post Brexit also just dumb.

  3. Handlebars

    They named it after The Reckless Engineer. Very droll.

    1. alain williams Silver badge

      I would rather that it was named after an engineer than a politician.

      1. HuBo Silver badge
        Windows

        Yeah, and they're all named Isambard over there anyways, with Isambard (aka Isambard-1) as the first all-ARM supercomputer, based on Thunder-X2 chips. Isambard-2 upgraded that to A64FX. Isambard-3 has 2 partitions, one is Grace-Grace and the other Grace-Hopper (GH200).

        This here Isambard-AI is (I believe) part of the GH200 partition, with a test rig named Isambard-AI phase 1 currently at #155 in Top500 with 7.4 PF/s Rmax.

        The Isambard-AI in TFA is about half the size of the Swiss Cheese Alps 10,752 GH200 super (#7 in Top500 with 435 PF/s Rmax), also an HPE EX design, which is used for both HPC and AI. I would hope (expect, really) that the whole Isambard-3 will similarly be usable for both types of workloads, despite the AI moniker of one of its partitions (iiuc).

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        I would rather that it was named after an engineer than a politician.

        I don't know.

        Naming it after Bloody Stupid Johnson might one day, in hindsight, prove to be incredibly prophetic.

        Either Bergholt Stuttley or Boris de Piffle; your choice; either way a dismal half dozen of one or the other.

        1. Evil Scot Silver badge
          Pint

          Re: I would rather that it was named after an engineer than a politician.

          Footnote, Pratchett reference and political statement.

          I raise my glass to you

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: I would rather that it was named after an engineer than a politician.

            I personally would have home for either Deep Thought (HHGTTG - 42) or ORAC.

    2. Fr. Ted Crilly Silver badge

      I have this atmosphere powered railway you can buy if you want...

  4. Dan 55 Silver badge

    In other news today

    Advanced AI suffers ‘complete accuracy collapse’ in face of complex problems, study finds

    ‘Pretty devastating’ Apple paper raises doubts about race to reach stage of AI at which it matches human intelligence

    So we have just enough AI to take jobs away from working in creative industries and call centres but not enough AI to solve any of the great problems the human race obviously needs help with (energy, climate, food...).

    1. cyberdemon Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: In other news today

      Came here to post that very link. Well done.

      Disappointing to not see the Reg angle on that paper yet

      Also curious as to why Apple would publish such a damning report, I thought they were about to leap headfirst into this AI nonsense

      1. HuBo Silver badge
        Windows

        Re: In other news today

        An interesting paper indeed, by the same Apple team who previously evaluated LLMs' abilities at grade-school mathematical reasoning using their own independent benchmarks (GSM-Symbolic), identifying similar limitations to the AI software.

        Here, Figure 4, shows Towers of Hanoi collapsing at 4 or 5 disks without CoT in Claude Sonnet 3.7 and DeepSeek V3, and at 8 disks with the "reasoning" version of the models. Checkers jumping collapses at 2 vs 3 checkers, blocks world collapses beyond 2 blocks for either type of model, and river crossing with 2 people (not more) is ok with CoT but fails without it. Fig. 6 shows o3-mini is better at checkers jumping and blocks world by a bit but all tested LLMs fail "beyond certain complexity threshold" that is rather low (imho).

        Makes me wonder how much Graph of Thought (GoT) might help in this, if at all ...

        [edited to add]: The El Reg Expert take on this study is now up (the real McCoy!)!

    2. munnoch Silver badge

      Re: In other news today

      "LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities"

      That happens to me too....

    3. Grindslow_knoll

      Re: In other news today

      If it does become as intelligent as humans (and in its current form that's unlikely), there's going to be an awkward discussion on ethics. It's one thing to make a dumb tool work for you, but something with sentience and intelligence?

      1. MachDiamond Silver badge

        Re: In other news today

        "It's one thing to make a dumb tool work for you, but something with sentience and intelligence?"

        Now go off into the weeds and contemplate "differently intelligent".

        Humans grow up in a society where they absorb all sorts of social instruction that's not directly taught, yet we know, "hey, doing this would be wrong". We know that chowing down on a Limburger sandwich on the Underground is not acceptable. Our ideas and goals get shaped by those learning's and an AI without them isn't going to make the same decisions a human would. It might shed new light on something, but more often it's outputs are not going to be biased towards the dreams and desires of humans. Will using them train us to be less human?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: In other news today

          Chowing down on a Limburger sandwich on the Underground is not acceptable.

          I am not in much better position than an AI agent to understand that. No idea what Limburger sandwich is - obvious originally from Limburg. "On " the "Underground" which would seem unaccountable to a LLM that had a model of prepositions of place and anyone who only knew Metro.

          The idea that AI in its current incarnation could ever reproduce the barest nuances of human socialisation would flatter the word ludicrous into blushing embarrassment.

          Looked up Limburger - apparently an extremely (mal)odiferous cheese seemingly composed of toe jam and rotting cadavers' socks. Durian on steroids.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: In other news today

            Sounds like the WMD grade Fish Pie a colleague brought to the office one day and was banned from ever doing again when microwaved.

      2. Like a badger Silver badge

        Re: In other news today

        "If it does become as intelligent as humans "

        Which humans? There's some thick bastards we share the planet with.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: In other news today

        I’d like to cite this a legal precedent/prior case history <LOL> though I think it was JAG legal as opposed to Joe Public..

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)

    4. MachDiamond Silver badge

      Re: In other news today

      "but not enough AI to solve any of the great problems the human race obviously needs help with (energy, climate, food...)."

      I'd set aside grand dreams of solving ill-defined problems and question what the tool* can do better today.

      *AI is just a tool and should be seen as one.

      Skroeder: Maybe it's pissed off.

      Newton Crosby: It's a machine, Schroeder. It doesn't get pissed off. It doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it doesn't laugh at your jokes.

      Newton Crosby, Ben Jabituya: [in unison] It just runs programs.

      Howard Marner: It usually runs programs.

      1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

        Re: In other news today

        Johnny 5 is Alive!

    5. Long John Silver Silver badge
      Pirate

      Re: In other news today

      I am puzzled by what is meant by AI 'matching human intelligence'.

      Assuming everyone is agreed upon what the word 'intelligence' means in this context, there remains the matter of what exactly has to be matched. Human intelligence -measured on interval scales or by simple observation of fellow mankind - varies immensely in terms of signifying potential accomplishments. 'Average' - mean, medium, or modal, as one wishes - is mundane; indeed people at that level would replicate the errors manifested by AI, that is if they could even understand the task.

      So, presumably, matching somewhere in the higher reaches of intelligence is sought, but where? If the problem were inverted, then one easily would identify the lowest range of functional intelligence as equivalent to the requirement for membership of the Welsh Assembly Government. Similarly, membership of the Westminster Commons hovers just below the 'average'. That leaves the puzzle of working out which occupational group(s) best typify the abilities required from AI. Suggestions please?

    6. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: In other news today

      "Suffers ‘complete accuracy collapse’ in face of complex problems."

      Might easily also be said of the current US administration and other governments; or of any politician generally.

    7. ChrisElvidge Silver badge

      Re: In other news today

      Also have to note that Atari better at chess than ChatGPT - see a previous story.

  5. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    With any luck, just in time for the bubble to burst.

  6. Youvegottobe Joking

    5000 GPUs for £225m

    If these Nvidia GPU's come on Nvidia's own 8 x GPU sled, like all the other vendors have, that comes to 625 servers. So with that assumption, each server costs ~£360k, hoollleeee shhheeeet. I saw something early this year stating that grace hopper single gpu machines were costing ~$41k and up so I would say HPE are making a nice profit here.

    1. MachDiamond Silver badge

      "~$41k and up so I would say HPE are making a nice profit here."

      $41k for a raw sled, not something in a rack with power supplies and the rest of the circuitry and certifications. The total cost might also include cooling and power back up.

  7. Rob 63

    We spent loads on this shiny new machine … anyone know how to use it?!

    1. Long John Silver Silver badge
      Pirate

      I anticipate, after lengthy cogitation, and no matter what the question posed, Mr Starmer's 'wonder machine' will spit out the answer forty-four.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      We spent loads on this shiny new machine … anyone know how to use it?!

      Decent number of 64 bit flops (AI's 8 bit flops pretty useless for much else I suspect) which should permit some decent computational fluid dynamics, or operations research problems that require linear algebra with gazillions of equations with zillions of variables.

      As might be easily predicted the facility will be obsolete before these punters finally throw in their hand and make the resources available to those that can use the facility to do useful work.

    3. ChrisElvidge Silver badge

      But it's an AI

      Should know how to run itself, shouldn't it?

      1. MachDiamond Silver badge

        Re: But it's an AI

        "Should know how to run itself, shouldn't it?"

        At that point you have The Schumann Computer and once its solved the answer to life, the universe and everything, it will shut itself off and not answer any more silly questions from meatsacks.

        (References from Niven, Adams and MiB all in one go)

  8. Dicing

    Job loss is a concern for many. I have yet to see senior managers, directors et al being exposed to the same threat and speculation. Can they not be replaced by AI, and if so, why not?

    Various layers of employees are suddenly perceived as outdated. Never mind the cladding. You can call it this or that, the outcome is the same.

    What about those senior leaders, though? Who needs shepherds if there are no sleep?

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "... We need to push past it." If it weren't the UK Prime Minister ...

    I would suspect the speaker of being an arrogant c@nt.

    "this debate has been had many times. We need to push past it."

    Perhaps realistically and honestly addressing all the issues and contrary views to reach some kind of consensus might be a better look as "pushing past " is redolent of the bully and as the "crash through or crash " mindset was of a former and equally obtuse generation.

    AI/LLM is not going to solve the world's problems (ever); it will solve some well defined problems for some people (eventually); mostly it will create a massive surplus of problems from its innumerable unforeseen consequences and be responsible for damage that in some cases will take decades to repair.

    "Fortunately" the way things are heading our current crop of loons are just as likely to cause a deep global recession that smothers this nonsense by removing its financial oxygen before too much irreversible harm is done.

    † of course he necessarily won't always be the prime minister ...

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Amazing achievement...

    ... given it's not fully operational or powered on: https://top500.org/system/180388

  11. fg_swe Silver badge

    AI Will Replace

    -Steel mills

    -Nuclear Power Plants

    -Natural Gas

    -Coal

    -Chemical Plants

    -Plumbers

    -Skilled Workshop men at their CNC machine

    -blacksmiths

    That is, if you believe WEF Muppets like Starmer.

    In fact these imbeciles moved industry to China and made all of Europe much poorer. And colder in the winter.

    1. MachDiamond Silver badge

      Re: AI Will Replace

      What you've left off of the list is the designers of things meant for humans.

  12. steelpillow Silver badge
    Holmes

    Every cloud has a silver lining

    TBH, I reckon that if it just educates everybody in what they /should/ have asked for, it will have been worth it. Save a bloody fortune next time round.

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