Isambard 2, the world's first Arm-based supercomputer, retires after six years of service — Isambard 3 will tap Nvidia's Grace CPU Superchips

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The GW4 consortium is getting a supercomputer upgrade.

Isambard-2 supercomputer
(Image credit: Marvell Technology/YouTube)

Isambard 2, one of the first Arm-based supercomputers, is finally set to retire after six years. First deployed in May 2018, this 10,000-core machine used 64-bit Armv8 ThunderX2 processors developed by Cavium and manufactured by TSMC, plus a few Nvidia P100 GPUs.

The Great Western 4 (GW4) Alliance, a group of universities from Bristol, Bath, Cardiff, and Exeter, was the primary operator of the Isambard 2, with Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, Head of the Microelectronics Group at the University of Bristol, leading the project. He also broke the news about Isambard 2’s retirement in an X post, saying that its successor, Isambard 3, will come online to take over its duties. The Arm supercomputer will go offline at 9 am on Monday, September 30, so users must move all data off it by then.

The new supercomputer, Isambard 3, is still powered by Arm processors, but this time, it will have Nvidia Grace CPU Superchips with 34,272 cores. Although it’s currently not in the Top500’s list of most powerful supercomputers, it achieved second place in the Green500 in June 2024, making it one of the most efficient supercomputers available today. Furthermore, Isambard 3 is set to expand its processor count by an additional 5,280, increasing its performance by up to 32 times and potentially land it in the top 10 of the Top500 list in its next run.

Isambard 2 isn’t the first high-profile supercomputer to retire in 2024. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Summit supercomputer is also set to be decommissioned in November this year. This supercomputer was built in 2018, the same year as Isambard 2, but has since been replaced by the far more powerful Frontier supercomputer.

Supercomputers cost millions of dollars to acquire and even more to operate. However, as technology advances, institutions need to keep up, thus requiring the retirement of older models, even if they still operate well. Newer silicon offers better performance and efficiency, allowing researchers to achieve breakthroughs faster. As such, these massive computer advancements in science and technology will make the enormous investment worth it.

Jowi Morales
Jowi Morales
Contributing Writer

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

3 Comments Comment from the forums
  • bit_user
    Wow, no mention of Fugaku? I figured that's what this was going to be about, because it was the first ARM-based supercomputer that I was aware of (and the first to be notable for something other than the mere use of ARM CPUs):
    https://www.tomshardware.com/news/japanese-arm-based-supercomputer-fugaku-is-now-world-most-powerful
    One thing that's interesting about it is that each core featured 2x 512-bit SVE pipelines. In the case of Nvidia's Grace, each of its V2 cores has only 4x 128-bit SVE2. So, the clock-normalized performance for vector FP operations is likely worse for Grace. SVE2 improved somewhat over the original SVE, but not by that much.
    Reply
  • vern72
    What is the typical lifespan of a super computer?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    vern72 said:
    What is the typical lifespan of a super computer?
    I don't know, but some of the longer-lived ones seem to have a mix of node types. At some point, they start adding nodes that have better specs and more up-to-date hardware than the others.

    So, perhaps the answer to your question partly depends on how you define a supercomputer. At the end of the day, it's really just a network of machines, running specific protocols, and services. They're initially sold as one big contract, but they can often be upgraded in a piecemeal approach, like what happened here:
    "Alpine was part of ORNL's storage solution for Summit and its peripheral systems, holding scratch data from the supercomputer and its external nodes, which pre- and post-process Summit's calculations. The Alpine storage system held 250 petabytes of capacity inside 32,494 10TB NL-SAS drives. Made up of 77 IBM Elastic Storage Server (ESS) nodes, the system could have 2.2 TB/s random read and write speeds at its peak. Still, in recent years, drive failure rates have hit unacceptable levels, necessitating installing a stopgap replacement storage system, Alpine2."

    https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/supercomputers/ornl-shreds-250-petabytes-of-disk-drives-from-the-summit-supercomputer-alpine-storage-system-dismantled-in-preparation-for-the-worlds-fastest-supercomputer
    Reply