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back to article UK waves £750M supercomputer contract at HPC builders

The British government is putting out feelers to industry ahead of the procurement process for the country's most powerful supercomputer, set to begin next year. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has issued a Preliminary Market Engagement Notice to get the attention of vendors that may have an interest in bidding to build the …

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  1. Like a badger Silver badge

    How much supercomputer does £330m buy?

    I'm guessing not a lot, but I could be wrong, its not the sort of thing I put in my shopping basket often. And does that £330m worth make a difference? The described benefits and actual purpose seem to be vague and unquantified, like most government projects.

    3 1 Reply
    1. UK Jim
      Reply Icon

      Re: How much supercomputer does £330m buy?

      You can see some of the research that has been enabled by the current machine (Archer2) at https://www.archer2.ac.uk/research/case-studies/

      It all looks important and beneficial to me.

      If we are serious about retaining and attracting scientists to the UK, we need to ensure that the resources they need are available, and a serious HPC machine is such a resource.

      This is not a hype-laden AI machine, but one for running important scientific codes to enable research. (Many of which may even be in Fortran :-) https://cpufun.substack.com/p/is-fortran-a-dead-language)

      0 0 Reply
      1. HPCJohn
        Reply Icon

        Re: How much supercomputer does £330m buy?

        Admittedly dated 2022, this is a breakdown of the codes used on the current ARCHER 2 system

        https://www.archer2.ac.uk/news/2022/02/07/software-usage-data.html

        0 0 Reply
  2. TVU Silver badge

    All I can say is that I hope that this contract works out better for them than their Oracle contract.

    1 0 Reply
  3. Rivalroger
    Mushroom

    Fujitsu!!!??

    Presumably this will publish fudged and false output and will then get the researcher pushished for committing plagiarism.

    1 0 Reply
    1. Rivalroger
      Reply Icon

      Re: Fujitsu!!!??

      s/pushished/punished/

      My typing gets worse and worse as I get older and grumpier!

      1 0 Reply
    2. steviesteveo
      Reply Icon

      Re: Fujitsu!!!??

      Fujitsu seem to have played an incredible have your cake and eat it move by promising to step back from public contract tenders while the Horizon inquiry was in progress and then just continuing as usual

      0 0 Reply

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