UK Prime Minister wants £800M for big British iron • The Register

Evaluation This week British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak unveiled his Science and Know-how Framework, and one of many first tasks could possibly be an enormous supercomputer to rival the US’s high ranked Frontier system — assuming he can discover the cash to pay for it.

Citing a number of sources acquainted with the matter, Bloomberg reports that the British Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt, had begun reviewing proposals to speculate as a lot as £800 million — circa $950 million — to construct a supercomputer.

Supercomputers, as Reg readers know, are utilized by governments for a wide range of scientific and army functions starting from the upkeep and protected storage of nuclear armament to local weather modeling, elementary physics, and drug discovery to call only a few.

Whereas Sunak’s tremendous wasn’t talked about within the framework published earlier this week, the prime minister’s newly shaped Division of Science, Innovation, and Know-how has reportedly drawn up plans for Massive British Iron. One of many extra notable provisions, is that the machine would reportedly be constructed by UK companies and utilizing chips and techniques offered by British chipmakers, beneath a plan that might reinvest these funds into the native tech financial system.

That is notable since it might appear to preclude US-based HPE and French HPC vendor Atos from being a part of the deal. These two corporations are liable for constructing many of probably the most highly effective supercomputers on this planet. And assuming the £800 million is the precise value of the machine, the proposed tremendous could be immense, probably dwarfing the US Frontier supercomputer, which at present holds the number-one spot on the Top500, at $600 million.

Whereas it is not clear who would finally assemble the machine, and even who would provide the elements, one chance is British startup Graphcore.

The corporate is already engaged on an AI supercomputer known as the Good Machine, named for British mathematician Irving John Good, who labored alongside Alan Turing. And as our sister website The Subsequent Platform fairly morbidly identified, Good additionally predicted that synthetic intelligence would result in the downfall of the human race and finally our extinction.

Nevertheless, the Good machine, at 10 exaflops of “AI efficiency” — to not be confused with the exaflop of FP64 efficiency achieved by the Frontier system — is comparatively low-cost at an estimated value of $120 million in comparison with what Sunak apparently has in thoughts.

One other chance is that the proposed system will go for British cores if not silicon — maybe with a sticker that reads “Designed in Britain, Assembled within the USA or Japan” And meaning utilizing an Arm-based processor.

The British chip designer has steadily expanded its portfolio to handle datacenter, cloud, and HPC functions. And Arm additionally has a reasonably good observe file in the case of supercomputers. Riken’s number-two ranked Fugaku system makes use of Fujitsu’s Arm-based A64FX processor. One other potential provider could possibly be Nvidia. Regardless of being an American firm, Nvidia not solely has a protracted historical past of high-performance computing, but in addition makes use of Arm’s CPU cores — particularly the Neoverse V2 structure — in its Grace and Grace-Hopper superchips.

The latter techniques might conceivably be constructed domestically as Nvidia has already developed reference designs for its Grace-based HGX techniques.

After all, all of that is assuming that Sunak can discover the money to pay for such a machine. Bloomberg notes that the British Treasury has but to log out on the funding. The publication cited a number of, unnamed individuals who indicated that talks between the Division of Science and Know-how and the Treasury have been ongoing. One other supply mentioned it was unlikely {that a} decision could be present in time for subsequent week’s annual finances.

Sunak’s technological ambitions might additionally face backlash from the British individuals who, confronted with rising inflation and provide chain shortages on the market, have been reportedly informed by British Atmosphere Secretary Therese Coffey to eat turnips as an alternative. ®