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£52 Million Govt Funding for New UK Supercomputer

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the more-flops-a-good-thing dept.

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."

8 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Born Yesterday? by ExE122 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    However, it is unlikely to ever be pushed to its limits

    Give it a little while. Ten years ago, people thought 16MB of RAM was excessive. Ten years before that, 512KB was considered a luxury.

    --
    "Man Bites Dog
    Then Bites Self"
    --
    Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
    1. Re:Born Yesterday? by plankrwf · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Nope, we will say: and we thougth that THAT was anywhere near good enough
      to actually make any chance of beeting a 12 year old in the game of Go

      Roel

    2. Re:Born Yesterday? by DrMrLordX · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sure they do. For what do you think the Extreme Edition(EE) chips were built? They're enthusiast parts meant to be overclocked. Same deal for AMD's FX line of CPUs.

    3. Re:Born Yesterday? by GKThursday · · Score: 2, Insightful

      RTFA. 52 million POUNDS. That's around over $90 million.

    4. Re:Born Yesterday? by Siffy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Well, that is how Moore's Law and military spending work.

  2. 100,000 times faster than an ordinary computer by Expert+Determination · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Of course it's 100,000 times faster than an ordinary computer. It's a rack of 100,000 ordinary computers.

    Anyone remember the days when the word 'supercomputer' actually meant something?

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    "The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
  3. From my knowledge of UK government IT history . . by Don_dumb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This will be made by EDS, in a poorly thought out 'Public Private Partnership' and will cost three times as much, arrive in 2010 and be obsolete when it does.
    If you think I am being too cynical, just look at their track record. The CSA computer system, the air traffic control system, etc

    What amazes me is that they still get more work. Surely even New Labour have a limit to how far a bribe can take them.

    --
    If this were really happening, what would you think?
  4. Re:From my knowledge of UK government IT history . by MrTufty · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Add on the system for changing over farmers to the Single Payment Scheme... I was forced to work on that, and it sucked total balls. Fell over every 15 minutes tops, usually losing all the work you'd done to that point. EDS again. High quality development.