As the name suggests, a supercomputer has more processing power and can complete more tasks more quickly than a less powerful computer.
The BBC are getting too technical.
I work on this. Any questions, let me know.
Can it run Doom?
What do you work on for this?
Can I work on it too?
I don’t know what to ask specifically but can you talk more about the project or like anything cool that isn’t mentioned in the article? I’m an undergrad at a U.S. Uni and we have a supercomputer(cluster I think?) but everything is new to me and I would like to learn more.
I’d like to ask what OS it’s running and also ask you to bear in mind what the correct answer is on this particular platform.
What’s the admin password? Is it *******?
The article doesn’t really explain. Isn’t this just a computer that belongs to the university or is this actually got something to do with the government.
The government fronted £225M for it. Therefore it’s being seen as a national resource that’s located in Bristol where they’ve built previous machines like this.
How machine time is allocated would be interesting to know. Whether it’s only an academic resource, or if it’s available to other organisations?
That picture reminds me of the Internet in the IT Crowd.
Best info I’ve found on the is on the Nvidia blog
- Cost £225M of government money
- 21 exaflops of AI performance
- 5,448 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips
It’s a platform to accelerate breakthroughs in:
- AI-driven drug discovery
- Advanced climate modeling
- Materials science
- Large language models (LLMs) tuned to U.K. languages and laws
Early flagship projects include:
- Nightingale AI: A sovereign, multimodal health foundation model trained on National Health Service (NHS) data to support earlier diagnoses and personalized care.
- BritLLM: A U.K.-developed LLM project supporting British languages like Welsh, alongside English, to promote inclusivity and better public service delivery in healthcare, education and public services.
- UCL Cancer Screening AI: Developing the first scalable AI system for prostate cancer detection via MRI, aiming for faster diagnoses and tailored treatments.
- EIMCRYSTAL (University of Liverpool): Using AI to search 68 million chemical combinations to discover greener, more sustainable industrial materials — reducing reliance on rare or toxic inputs.
- EgoAI (University of Bristol): Using AI to analyze recordings from wearable cameras and other smart devices to help people perform tasks better at home. This holds immense promise for assisting dementia patients in the future.
…and it takes 5MW to run, which is pretty low for this sort of thing.
I’m confident that the BBC could have taken a better picture of their correspondent! Blimey.
