UK reheats Edinburgh supercomputer plan sans exascale chops 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 …
We don't design the chips. We don't build the systems. We barely understand them. But we do know how to announce things. That, we’ve mastered.
Instead of being a superpower in AI, we’re a superconsumer - buying our relevance from other countries while calling it "innovation." The only thing we manufacture at scale is press releases.
Meanwhile, skilled engineers are priced out, overtaxed, or replaced by imported labour to cut costs for big corporations. The state pretends to support science, but in reality it can’t even support a functioning IT department. Let alone an ecosystem.
A billion here, a billion there - but no one can explain where the money actually goes, what we're buying, who it's for, or why it was cancelled in the first place. Just more motion without progress.
Call it what it is: a procurement announcement with delusions of sovereignty.
@elsergiovolador
Yup......right in line with the regular (and accelerating) announcements from SW1 that "We are doing something".
Except:
- Our aircraft carriers suffer from propellors falling off
- Our type 45 Destroyers are "dead in the water" from defective cooling systems
- Our rivers are full of sewage
- Our (former) policies get changed on the first of every month (see supercomputers, winter heating, etc, etc)
....it's only the 12th of June.......the 1st of July is only a few days away!
Lovely thumbnail of Edinburgh Castle beside the front page link, I'm sure. But that has nothing to do with the University of Edinburgh- i.e. where the computer will be built- any more than a picture of the Tower of London would have anything to do with University College London if they'd chosen to build it there.
TNP had a very nice piece on the need to upgrade ARCHER last year (when the funding was paused). It also summarized some aspects of contemporary UK supercomputing where (iiuc) Bristol gets the Isambards (#11 in Top500), Edinburgh (birthplace of Edinburgh Prolog) gets the Archers (#79), and Cambridge (birthplace of ARM) gets the Dawns (#82) ... worth a gander!
Also, I guess Glascow (birthplace of the Glascow Haskell Compiler) is expected to use the Archers (both in Scotland) ...
Why not?
It's meant to be part of UK infrastructure, after all, not specifically England's (nor the rUK's).
We keep getting told by unionist politicians that Scotland enjoys the claimed benefits of being a part of the United Kingdom. You're saying that it shouldn't?
So long as Scotland remains a part of the UK, that's how it's supposed to work, unless and until either Scotland votes for independence *or* the majority of people in England and elsewhere vote to end the union.
But if you want to make a fuss about it, it's not like Westminster had a problem locating the UK's nuclear subs up here, is it? I'm sure that had nothing to do with the fact that even a major retaliatory strike on them would be safely far from any significantly-populated regions of England.
Since you want your share, what's the nearest site to Manchester that would be practical to move them to?
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