Professor of High Performance Computing. Director of the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS), including Isambard-AI and Isambard 3. University of Bristol, UK.

“Early experience from running the United Kingdom’s National AI Supercomputer Service“

Tuesday 17 February 2026

Abstract

The UK’s Isambard-AI national supercomputer service was built and deployed in record time, from breaking ground in June 2024 to going into production in August 2025. Optimised specifically for artificial intelligence applications, and ranked #11 on the current Top500, Isambard-AI has already grown to over 1,400 users and 400 projects in its first six months. In this talk, we’ll summarise some of the early learnings from running an AI national service, as well as our experience of using technologies such as modular data centres to enable the rapid deployment of this new 5MW supercomputer.

Bio

Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith is the founder and Director of the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing, which runs the UK’s Isambard-AI service. He began his career in industry as a microprocessor architect, first at Inmos and STMicro in the 1990s, before co-designing the world’s first fully programmable GPU at Pixelfusion in 1999. In 2002 he co-founded ClearSpeed Technology where, as Director of Architecture and Applications, he co-developed the first modern many-core HPC accelerators. He previously founded the HPC Research Group in Bristol, where his research interests include advanced computer architectures and performance portability.

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