The Chancellor has committed up to £750 million in the spending review to fund a new national supercomputer, hosted at the University of Edinburgh. The new supercomputer will vastly exceed the capacity of ARCHER2 the UK's current national supercomputing service.
The announcement comes as the Prime Minister unveiled £1 billion of additional funding, designed to increase the UK's AI compute power twentyfold.
The supercomputer will provide the power for the UK to conduct cutting-edge research to promote the scientific advancements of the future, in personalised medical treatments or modelling climate change, for example.
More details about the system will be set out in the upcoming Compute Roadmap which will outline government compute infrastructure strategy. This will be published in the summer.
The supercomputer will work in conjunction with the AI Research Resource, a network of the UK's most powerful supercomputers currently working on Alzheimer's vaccines and cancer treatments. The Compute Roadmap will layout plans to expand the AI Research Resource 20 times over by 2030.
This week, Isambard-AI, currently the UK's most powerful supercomputer, was ranked in the top ten most powerful supercomputers globally and the top five in Europe. It will become fully operational this summer as the government turbocharges AI transformation.
UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology, Peter Kyle said: "from the shipyards of the Clyde to developments in steam engine technology, Scottish trailblazers were central to the industrial revolution – so the next great industrial leap through AI and technology should be no different."
Secretary of State for Scotland Ian Murray said: "this is a landmark moment and will place Scotland at the forefront of the UK’s technological revolution. The £750 million investment in Edinburgh’s new supercomputer places Scotland at the cutting edge of computing power globally."
Lucy Baldwin
