The British government has U-turned on the earlier cancellation of a supercomputer project – saying the Chancellor will commit up to £750 million for a new supercomputer in Edinburgh which will “vastly exceed the capacity of the UK’s current national supercomputer, ARCHER2.”

(ARCHER2 is a a 23-cabinet HPE Cray EX supercomputing system with an estimated peak performance of 28 PFLOP/s. The machine has 5,860 nodes of dual AMD EPYC 7742 64 core CPUs, giving 748,544 cores in total.)

Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had seen two of his AI spending commitments, worth £500 million and £800 million, dropped by the new government; that had included funding for a supercomputer in Edinburgh.

During an exchange in the House of Commons last month, shadow technology secretary Alan Mak said: “Labour have cancelled Britain’s new national supercomputer at Edinburgh University, damaging our research capability and economic growth. The project was fully funded by the Conservatives, and the university says it will be a disaster if the cancellation isn’t reversed. So, will the government reinstate that supercomputer, or will it be another victim of the chancellor’s failed economic experiment?”

Labour’s incumbent technology secretary Peter Kyle MP said the “money never existed” and that the Conservatives had “let the country down” with unfunded commitments."

A "Compute Roadmap" is coming...

The government will set out more details about the system in our upcoming Compute Roadmap, which we will publish this summer,” it said.

“It will outline the government’s strategic approach to building world-class compute infrastructure in the UK - which will include the new national supercomputer in Edinburgh and our investment to expand the AI Research Resource by at least 20 times by 2030,” HMG said on June 11.

HPE’s Matt Harris said the welcome investment will “put us right back at the top table internationally and will turbocharge scientific and technological discovery. This level of investment will ensure that the UK can procure the most advanced systems on earth and deliver on the Government’s ambition to be in the top 3 globally for AI development…”

The news comes after the Prime Minister at London Tech Week unveiled £1 billion of extra funding to scale up the country’s AI compute.

More reaction to follow.

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