Isambard Day 2025
The Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS) is hosting the inaugural Isambard Day on 11th-12th March 2025.
The two day meeting brings together experts in artificial intelligence and supercomputing to share and discuss progress and challenges.
Location and practicalities
Isambard Day will be held at the Meetings & Event Centre at The Bristol Hotel, Bristol City Centre.
Registration will open at 9am on both days.
For any enquiries during Isambard Day, please speak to a member of the BriCS team (who will be wearing BriCS branded clothing). If you need to get in touch afterwards, you can email us at [email protected]
We would appreciate if you could provide your feedback on Isambard Day using this short form.
Conference Schedule
This markdown schedule was generated with AI using Claude 3.7 Sonnet!
You can also click here to download a PDF programme: Isambard-Day-2025-Programme.pdf
Day 1 - Tuesday 11th March
Registration and refreshments (9:00 - 10:00)
Ballroom 1 - Session 1. Chair: Richard Gilham (10:00 - 11:15)
| Time |
Presentation |
Speaker |
Affiliation |
| 10:00 - 10:15 |
Welcome to the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing & Isambard Day 2025 |
Simon McIntosh-Smith |
Bristol Centre for Supercomputing |
| 10:15 - 11:15 |
Keynote: Empowering European HPC and AI ecosystem - case Finland |
Pekka Lehtovuori |
CSC |
Refreshments (11:15 - 11:45)
Ballroom 1 - Session 2. Chair: Christopher Woods (11:45 - 1:00)
| Time |
Presentation |
Speaker |
Affiliation |
| 11:45 - 12:20 |
Free and Open Large Language Models for the Languages and Use-cases of the British Isles: BritLLM |
Pontus Stenetorp |
University College London |
| 12:20 - 1:00 |
Tone Bias in Skin Cancer Image Datasets UBias |
James Pope |
University of Bristol |
Lunch (1:00 - 2:00)
Ballroom 1 - Session 3. Chair: Anna Price (2:00 - 3:00)
| Time |
Presentation |
Speaker |
Affiliation |
| 2:00 - 2:25 |
Personality of a magnet: Simulating chemical ordering in FeNi at the atomic and sub-atomic length scale |
Christopher D. Woodgate |
University of Bristol |
| 2:25 - 2:50 |
Drug discovery using Ligand-Transformer |
Shengyu Zhang |
University of Cambridge |
| 2:50 - 3:00 |
Day 2, conference feedback & Isambard Day 2026 |
Richard Gilham |
Bristol Centre for Supercomputing |
Refreshments (3:00 - 3:30)
Ballroom 1 - Session 4. Chair: Sadaf Alam (3:30 - 5:00)
| Time |
Presentation |
Speaker |
Affiliation |
| 3:30 - 3:55 |
Testing the LSST stack and imSim performance on Isambard 3 |
Ritchie Somerville |
on behalf of William Lucas & George Beckett, EPCC |
| 3:55 - 4:20 |
Weather and climate modelling on Isambard: Porting the UM and LFRic |
Annette Osprey |
NCAS-CMS, University of Reading |
| 4:20 - 5:00 |
Panel: The evolving role of Supercomputing DRIs in the Dynamic AI Landscape |
Pekka Lehtovuori, Paul Calleja, Maxime Martinasso, Ritchie Somerville, Simon McIntosh-Smith |
CSC Finland, RCS Cambridge UK, CSCS Switzerland, EPCC UK, BriCS UK |
Close of Day 1 (5:00)
Day 2 - Wednesday 12th March
Registration & Refreshments (9:00 - 9:30)
Ballroom 1 - Session 5. Chair: Simon McIntosh-Smith (9:30 - 11:00)
| Time |
Presentation |
Speaker |
Affiliation |
| 9:30 - 10:30 |
Keynote: Alps, the sibling of Isambard-AI |
Thomas Schulthess |
CSCS |
| 10:30 - 11:00 |
Harnessing the uniqueness of the NHS for GenAI: LifeGPT |
Aldo Faisal |
Imperial College London |
Refreshments (11:00 - 11:30)
Parallel Sessions (11:30 - 12:45)
Ballroom 1 - Session 6a. Chair: Pete Chase
| Time |
Presentation |
Speaker |
Affiliation |
| 11:30 - 11:55 |
Automated Attacks on LLM Activation Monitors |
Eric Winsor |
UK AI Security Institute |
| 11:55 - 12:25 |
Building digital twins of the Universe with the DiRAC HPC Facility |
Mark Wilkinson |
STFC |
| 12:25 - 12:45 |
Language Model Pretraining on Shared Computing Resources: A Case Study of BritLLM |
Yao Lu |
University College London |
Ballroom 2 - Session 6b. Chair: Thomas Green
| Time |
Presentation |
Speaker |
Affiliation |
| 11:30 - 11:55 |
Semantic Feature Learning for Scientific Data and GPU Performance Evaluation |
Jaehoon Cha |
STFC |
| 11:55 - 12:25 |
High-Order Computational Fluid Dynamics using CODA on Isambard |
Christopher Wales |
University of Bristol |
| 12:25 - 12:45 |
Generative Adversarial Networks and HPC for simulation of plasma turbulence |
Jony Castagna |
UKRI-STFC Hartree Centre |
George White Room - Session 6c
| Time |
Presentation |
Lead |
Affiliation |
| 11:30 - 12:45 |
Hands-on workshop using Isambard-AI to set up and run a simple chatbot via a Jupyter notebook (pre-registration required) |
Wahab Kawafi |
Bristol Centre for Supercomputing |
Lunch (12:45 - 1:45)
Parallel Sessions (1:45 - 3:00)
Ballroom 1 - Session 7a. Chair: Matt Williams
| Time |
Presentation |
Speaker |
Affiliation |
| 1:45 - 2:10 |
KidSat: satellite imagery to map childhood poverty |
Juliette Unwin |
University of Bristol |
| 2:10 - 2:35 |
Towards Transparent AI in Computational Pathology: Concept Learning for Clinical AI |
Greg Verghese |
King's College London |
| 2:35 - 3:00 |
Extracting Semantics from Cultural Heritage Text |
Cédric Mesnage |
Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Exeter |
Ballroom 2 - Session 7b. Chair: Fan Yang-Turner
| Time |
Presentation |
Speaker |
Affiliation |
| 1:45 - 2:10 |
Molecular Dynamics Simulations and the Magic of AI/ML |
Stefano Leoni |
Cardiff University |
| 2:10 - 2:35 |
mkN Benchmark: A simple Matrix Multiplication Benchmark for High-order Numerical Schemes |
Semih Akkurt |
Imperial College London |
| 2:35 - 3:00 |
Deep Learning and High-Performance Computing in Molecular Dynamics |
Amir Masoud Nourollah |
Cardiff University |
George White Room - Session 7c
| Time |
Presentation |
Lead |
Affiliation |
| 1:45 - 3:00 |
Getting the knack with software stacks - A walkthrough to deploy software on Isambard systems |
Thomas Green |
Bristol Centre for Supercomputing |
Close of Day 2 (3:00)