Britain is investing billions of euros in its own exascale supercomputer

The UK is providing more than €1 billion to build its own exascale supercomputer for research and AI.

Britain is providing 900 million British pounds, the equivalent of just over 1 billion euros, for the construction of a new supercomputer. The ex-Europeans have targeted an exascale system. As of last year, the world has its first exascale HPC installation with the Frontier supercomputer in the US. The adjective implies that the computer has processing power in excess of 1,000 petaflops. Countries around the world now want to emulate this trick. In the EU, Germany will most likely get the first exascale system.

Everything for AI

So Britain does not want to be left behind. With the investment, the islanders also want to build an AI research resource that will make it immediately clear what the new HPC system will be used for. Treasury Secretary Jeremy Hunt points to the computing power that will be needed for AI in the future to illustrate the need for the computer.

Specific details about the new supercomputer are not yet known. It is not exactly clear how much computing power Great Britain is aiming for, who will build the supercomputer and which architecture will be used. AMD has hijacked a few tenders lately, but ARM is also an interesting candidate. After all, Arm’s headquarters are in the UK, and Japan has already shown that you can build very powerful computers with ARM chips.