The UK is allocating more than a billion euros to build its own exascale supercomputer aimed at research and AI.
The UK is offering 900 million British pounds, the equivalent of just over 1 billion euros, to build a new supercomputer. The former Europeans set their sights on an exascale system. Since last year, the world has had its first exascale HPC installation with the Frontier supercomputer in the US. The adjective indicates that the computer has more than 1,000 petaflops of computing power. Countries around the world are now looking to match that trick. In the EU, Germany will most likely get the first exascale system.
All for AI
So England doesn’t want to be left behind. Along with the investment, the Islanders also want to set up an AI research resource, which makes it immediately clear what the new HPC system will be used for. Treasury Secretary Jeremy Hunt points to the computing power needed for AI in the future to clarify the need for computing.
Concrete details about the new supercomputer are still unknown. So it’s unclear exactly how much computing power the UK is aiming for, who will build the supercomputer, and what architecture will be used. AMD has been hijacking some tenders lately, but ARM is an interesting candidate. After all, Arm is headquartered in the United Kingdom and Japan has already shown that you can build very powerful computers with ARM chips.
