Government revives shelved project with fresh funding but scaled-back ambitions
The UK government has disclosed plans for the country's most powerful supercomputer to be built in Edinburgh – less than a year after cancelling an identical plan.
As part of the Spending Review by Britain's finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, the government says it will find up to £750 million (just over $1 billion) for this system, which will be on top of the £1 billion (about $1.3 billion) in AI research funding announced by Prime Minister Keir Starmer earlier this week.
The new national supercomputer will be based at the University of Edinburgh, with the aim of giving scientists from across the UK the compute power needed for cutting-edge research into areas such as personalized medical treatments, making air travel more sustainable, or modeling climate change, the government said.
But cast your minds back a couple of years, and the previous administration announced plans for a national supercomputer in Edinburgh, claiming it would be "50 times more powerful than our current top-end system, ARCHER2," with a proposed budget of about £800 million.
These plans were cancelled by the incoming Labour government soon after taking office, sparking the usual accusations of betrayal from Scottish nationalist politicians, although the Westminster government later claimed the project had only been "paused" because the funding didn't exist at the time.
However, according to Times Higher Education, Edinburgh Uni had already built a £31 million ($42 million) facility to house the supercomputer by the time the cancellation was announced.
Now it appears that the government has had a change of heart and decided it really would like a national supercomputer to fill that Edinburgh data hall after all, and has reinstated the project, which never seemed to progress beyond early planning stages.
The Register understands that potential bidders to build the future system only got wind of this news shortly before it was announced, and the government has not so far decided upon the exact technical specifications for what is expected to be the UK's most powerful supercomputer, never mind signed any contracts.
One word conspicuous by its absence in the official announcement was "exascale." The previously announced supercomputer was expected to hit this performance level of a billion billion (1018) floating point calculations per second (FLOPS).
Professor Mark Parsons, director of EPCC (formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre) at the University of Edinburgh, told us: "We're no longer calling this the exascale system – that moment has passed."
ARCHER2 will be with us until the end of 2026, and the new system is expected to be ready in early 2027, he said.
"Given how technology advances, in that time frame I would expect it to be at least as powerful as the previously planned system, despite the new funding envelope," Parsons added.
The government said it will set out more details about the system in an upcoming Compute Roadmap, due to be published this summer, which will outline its strategic approach to building world-class compute infrastructure in the UK.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) have been tasked with ensuring that the Edinburgh supercomputer's size represents value for money and meets the needs of the diverse user groups of the UK's compute infrastructure.
HPE is likely to be a strong contender to build the so-far unnamed room heater, due to its track record in delivering other high-performance systems, including Isambard 3 and Isambard-AI at the University of Bristol.
Matt Harris, HPE managing director for UK, Ireland, Middle East and Africa, congratulated the British government for its commitment to investing so much in new supercomputers.
"Building on the UK's heritage as a science and research powerhouse, this investment will put us right back at the top table internationally and will turbocharge scientific and technological discovery. This level of investment will ensure that the UK can procure the most advanced systems on earth and deliver on the government's ambition to be in the top 3 globally for AI development." ®