£52 Million Govt Funding for New UK Supercomputer

Lancey writes "The BBC reports that the UK government has contributed £52 million towards the building of the High-End Computing Terascale Resource to replace two existing supercomputers currently in use by British scientists. The story claims a maximum speed of 100 teraflops, although it is unlikely that the machine will ever be pushed to this limit. Some of the government funding will also be used to train scientists and programmers to develop software capable of exploiting the machine's potential."

Re:Born Yesterday?

[adz]

However, it is unlikely to ever be pushed to its limits It would be more accurate to say that it is impossible to achieve the theoretical maximum speed, and very hard to come even close. Without doubt the machine will be used extensively and people will ensure they get as much performance as they can out of the system. Given how much it costs, they're hardly going to use it as a doortstop, are they?!

Donations Needed

[digitaldc]

This article should be renamed,
"£52 Million Govt Funding for New UK Supercomputer, Donations Needed to Help Find and Train People to Operate It"

Connection?

[sane?]

I wonder if that and this story [bbc.co.uk] on replacing the Trident nuclear deterent have any connection?

No nuclear testing means all proving of a new warhead design have to be done computationally. Now a new machine is being bought...

submitted a story a few days ago..

[Adult film producer]

But of a bigger and badder supercomputer that will require it's own 170 MW generating station..

Cray to build 24,000 quad-core Opteron Petacomp!!
Friday March 31, @07:03AM Rejected

check it out here.. [gcn.com].. now imagine a beowolf of those !!

Re:From my knowledge of UK government IT history .

[ralphclark]

the govt. are highly motivated to make this work. This is, after all, the machine they need to process all of the data that their ID card scheme will generate (and run face recognition software on live video feeds from thousands of surveillance cams, and decrypt and analyze internet traffic and PSTN voice data, and run sophisticated prediction algorithms on the lot). With approx. 50 milion adults who can now *all* be monitored 24/7 in terms of where they go who they talk to and what they talk about, that's surely going to need an order of magnitude more computing capacity than they have at GCHQ Cheltenham now.

I'm pretty sure EDS will be gagging to get a slice of that.