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British government officials have discussed funding for a supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh, just six months after a similar major computing project at the institution was shelved.
Officials have considered putting a new state-owned supercomputer at the university as part of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s upcoming computing strategy, according to people briefed on the discussions.
Work shrink the previous £800 million supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh after taking power in July, claiming the Conservatives had failed to allocate money for it while in office.
The move in August sparked a strong backlash from the technology and science community, which argued it would undermine Britain’s ambitions in those sectors.
The Prime Minister’s plan to increase the country’s computing capacity 20 times by 2030. published this weekhe again drew attention to the aborted “exascale” project in the Scottish capital. Exascale supercomputing is defined as the ability to produce a billion billion operations per second.
“Officials still want the supercomputer project to continue in Edinburgh,” said one person familiar with the internal discussions.
Another official said the government was looking for ways to reverse the decision to shut down the supercomputer.
The existing facility, which the university has already spent £30m on, could be converted into a new supercomputer project, the official said, adding that “the kit is already there”.
Labour’s Secretary of State for Scotland, Ian Murray, told the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday that the Edinburgh supercomputer was never “failed” and was instead being “re-assessed”.
“We were very clear with the University of Edinburgh that the project was not cancelled. . . but it is being reassessed and will go into the spending review process which has started and will be completed by the summer,” the MP told Edinburgh South. In June, Labor will reveal its detailed spending plans for the coming years.
“I hope we will achieve this as we approach the spending review. . . I hope that the investment made will not be in vain,” said Murray.
Starmer said this week that his administration would seek to increase government-owned computing capacity 20-fold by the end of the decade and soon begin work on a “brand new supercomputer.”
He did not reveal where the supercomputer will be or how much the state will invest in the project.
The government announced on Monday that it will create a 10-year computing roadmap in the spring, which will include commitments on future investments in the national computing infrastructure.
Exascale supercomputers are widely seen as key to the development of artificial intelligence in Britain, as well as to the performance of increasingly advanced scientific modelling.
The US already has three fully functional exascale computers, while China is believed to have two in operation and a third in development. Japan, the EU and France are in the process of building their first exascale computers, which are expected to come online within the next few years.
In November, Great Britain fell out of the ranking of the 50 most powerful computers in the world, according to the prestigious index called Top500.
Asked whether an exascale computer would be unveiled in Edinburgh in the next six months, UK science secretary Peter Kyle said on Monday that “I will be releasing a further strategy on computing in the spring”.
“I want to make sure we have the right resilient, sustainable investment that our country needs when it comes to public computing,” he added. A person close to Kyle said the Government’s position on the scrapped Edinburgh exascale project “hasn’t changed”.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said that “while the action plan focused specifically on artificial intelligence, we are also committed to developing a long-term computing plan that takes into account the full spectrum of scientific needs, including exascale computing”.
“As previously stated, the computer programs announced under the previous government were not fully funded and therefore the projects were not initiated.”
