UK govt finds £225M for Isambard-AI supercomputer powered by Nvidia The UK government says it will cough up £225 million ($273 million) for a supercomputer capable of more than 200 petaFLOPS of double-precision performance, with the University of Bristol to house the machine and Nvidia providing the core computing components. Detailed during UK's AI Safety Summit Wednesday, the machine – …
But these supercomputers would be used by scientists ( who are Godless Heathen Commies) to try and invent Vaccines or to suggest the Earth isn't at the center of the universe and is >4000years old.
That's why China (also Godless Heathen Commies) are building them,
Gentlemen we MUST let a supercomputer gap develop !
No, it's because it's a version of the Bard chat bot that instead of SSDs uses ISAM to access data stored on a load of old tape drives using a knackered old mainframe they found somewhere in the basement of a government department.
To be honest it's an improvement on the UK Metaverse they were planning that ditched 3D headsets for ascii-art printouts on a bunch of old line printers.
You can picture the scene.
Scientists have uploaded all the UK laws, policies, economic and other data, projections and things government have in the pipeline.
Cabinet gather around the desk and scientist says:
- What should I ask the computer?
- (PM) What do we need to do to win elections?
*fans whirring*
- (computer says) You won't win elections and call them now you pathetic losers.
*huffing and puffing*
- (Chancellor) Hey, Mr Scientist, Can you try to turn it off and on again?
Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.
Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.”
“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question that no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”
He turned to face the machine. “Is there a plan to win the next election?”
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of single relay.
KERNEL PANIC
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
(Answer by Fredric Brown, 1954)
Let's hope it doesn't go ahead.
All very well government spaffing quarter of a billion quid to sound big in the global supercomputing stakes in the same week Little Rishi spouts off about AI, but unfortunately it continues the problem of spending what government (and thus we) don't have. I saw a beautiful quote recently that I can't trace the source of now, but was something around "the problem with Britain is the government spend like Norway but tax like Moldova". That's further exacerbated by the fact that government spend too much on follies and current account spending, thus persistently under-investing and indeed reducing the capex in the facilities for services, which has been the case under both the current clowns, but also under the preceding Labour government.
Yeah, while we're at it, can we not build ANY infrastructure as it's a waste of money (HS2 exempt), and don't bother with Libraries, leisure centres, parks, cleaning, building main.
All a waste of money.
Give it to a hard done by consultant, as he has to work almost a 3 day we week, and those nurse that spend all day on the computer doing fuck all.
You want money for the NHS? Reduce waste, sack the lazy and useless ones (there are a LOT in the NHS), reduce bureaucracy, get rid of much of the management and get value for money.
The NHS isn't underfunded, it's badly run.
"You want money for the NHS? Reduce waste, sack the lazy and useless ones (there are a LOT in the NHS), reduce bureaucracy, get rid of much of the management and get value for money."
Well, according to the internationally recognised and respected King's Fund, the problem with NHS management is not that there's too many of them, but that there's far too few of them. Feel free to get alternative facts from the well qualified experts who write the comment columns of the Daily Mail, or the experienced professionals who contribute to that august publication's reader comments.
From university experience you can always appear to save money by reducing admin staff.
You just end up with professors doing a lot of general office paperwork
And postdocs spending a lot of time trying to learn how to sort out complex customs documentation for an imported part, cos there are no experienced office staff.
And people waiting around for weeks to get a part ordered because ordering is now outsourced to 8 layers of service provider
And expensive bits of kit standing idle because you got rid of the techs and so a PhD student from years ago who used 50% of it explained that to a student that used 50% of that function and explained to a student ....
But on paper we have cut the wasted admin "overhead" - while somehow paying $/£/€ to management consultants to say how efficient this is
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
