Summary
The UK’s national supercomputer, Archer2, has fallen to 62nd place globally, leading to concerns about the country’s supercomputing investment.
The new Labour government has shelved plans for a new exascale supercomputer, potentially hindering scientific and technological advancements.
What is the use of a singular machine like this? Isn’t it far better to have 50 less capable machines at different institutions. At $20 million each they’d still be impressive.
(I know it’s not really a singular machine, but the question stands).
Current modern supercomputers are actually a mesh of relatively lower spec machines, not a single “computer”, per se. The cost of these isn’t the hardware, it’s the low-latency interconnects and writing the software that can carry out jobs in a massively parallel way.
