One of the most advanced artificial intelligence supercomputers in the United Kingdom stopped operating after record high temperatures hit the country at the end of June, leading to the temporary suspension of several major scientific projects, including cancer vaccine research and climate change studies.
“Dawn,” the supercomputer owned by the University of Cambridge, was shut down on June 27 after the data center where it is housed experienced technical problems linked to the cooling system during the heatwave. The university said access is expected to begin being restored on Monday.
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Lennard Lee, director of the British project on Artificial Intelligence and Supercomputers in the development of a cancer vaccine at the University of Oxford, said the outage has temporarily blocked researchers’ activity.
“The Dawn supercomputer is out of service. This means our projects have been temporarily suspended. Fortunately, there has been no data loss and there will be no need to repeat the work carried out so far,” he said.
According to the University of Cambridge, the cause of the problem was linked to technical difficulties triggered by the high temperatures, while the cooling system has now been fully restored to operation.
With an investment worth millions of pounds, “Dawn” is used by dozens of scientific groups in Britain. It has contributed to the development of technologies that could speed up the creation of personalized cancer vaccines, as well as the detection of tumors in kidney scans through artificial intelligence.
Beyond the field of medicine, the system is also used by climate experts. The British Antarctic Survey has used it to predict changes in Antarctic sea ice, while other climate models also rely on its computing power.
Simon McIntosh-Smith, a professor of high-performance computing at the University of Bristol, raised concerns that heatwaves, which are becoming more frequent, could create major difficulties for supercomputers.
He said these systems are essential resources for scientific research and that any interruption to them is directly reflected in major projects.
According to him, building infrastructure capable of withstanding temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius is technically feasible, but would require much higher investment.
In an internal notice, the University of Cambridge linked the incident to a problem in the cooling system of the data center in West Cambridge.
However, French company Legrand, owner of USystems, which supplied the cooling technology, said its equipment operated according to technical specifications and did not suffer any malfunction during the incident.
Documents published earlier show that the university had discussed as early as December the need for urgent intervention to improve the cooling infrastructure at this center, but it is still unknown whether those investments were made.
