Overview
‘Sunrise’ is a £45 million 1.4 megawatt (MW) mission-focused AI supercomputer funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), owned by UKAEA and operated by the University of Cambridge.
Announced in the Fusion Strategy, Sunrise is expected to become the world’s most powerful supercomputer dedicated to fusion energy development. Sunrise is ranked in the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
Sunrise will bring together AMD, Dell Technologies, Intel, WEKA, DESNZ, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), UKAEA, and the University of Cambridge.
It will deliver up to 6.76 Exaflops of AI-accelerated modelling. This will enable high-fidelity simulations and the creation of digital twins for complex systems.
Sunrise will tackle key fusion energy challenges in areas such as plasma turbulence, materials development and tritium fuel breeding. There will be spillover benefits to other clean energy technologies and the UK’s broader net zero ambitions.
It will provide computing capacity for scientists, researchers, and engineers working on fusion, including modelling, simulation, and data analysis. The system forms part of wider work to expand the use of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing in fusion research and is the first phase of the computing needed to underpin the country’s first AI Growth Zone at UKAEA’s Culham Campus in Oxfordshire.
Sunrise is part of a broader programme of UK investment in AI research infrastructure. This includes the University of Cambridge’s Zenith supercomputer, which shares the same underlying computing architecture, and is described as one of the UK’s largest AI for science platforms, combining AI and simulation workloads.
Technical overview
The Sunrise supercomputer:
- delivers up to 6.76 Exaflops of AI-accelerated modelling
- is powered by 5th generation AMD EPYC™ processors and AMD Instinct™ MI355X GPUG accelerators – it is purpose-built on the Dell PowerEdge platform (Dell 8-way rack-scale servers) and uses cloud-native AI software stack from StackHPC
- contains 672 GPUs, a 192 dual-socket Intel Sapphire Rapids HBM 56-core CPU cluster and an advanced WEKA HPC filesystem
- is powered by 100% renewable energy and uses direct liquid cooling to chip
Contact the Sunrise team
If you have an interest in finding out more about Sunrise, including queries about potential future use, contact us.
Latest news
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£45 million for UK’s first AI supercomputer to accelerate fusion energy
1.4MW mission-focused supercomputer named ‘Sunrise’, primed to be the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer dedicated to fusion energy.
