The UK government is to spend "£36 million to increase the power of one of the UK’s leading supercomputing centres".
The £36m will go on 16GB of RAM.
Discussion
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@neil everyone should just wait until after the bubble pops. After that you might even be able to buy a semiconductor company with advanced manufacturing capability. At least if you're a state actor. States like Norway should really look into that. Convert your financial capital into real capital while you still can. Financial capital requires violence capital, and the latter might already be gone in practice. #eupol #ukpol #norway
@neil TBF in the 1970s we had a CDC Cyber 173, and we paid A$100,000 roughly of 100,000 (octal, so 32K decimal) 60 bit words of main memory!
@neil by the time government procurement is ready they'll be lucky to get 8GB
@neil file photo
@neil 16Gb of DDR 3 as well 🤣
This is far from the first UK government to throw money at buying hardware that is not very useful for computer science research, while simultaneously underinvesting in computer science research. And then complaining that UK universities are slipping in international rankings for computer science.
@david_chisnall @neil
Government always love to be seen *investing* in something. But then paying for *maintenance*, to make best use of the shiny new asset, has been massively out of fashion for *years*.
Buying new toys for your child, but skimping when it comes to their food.
I guess because politicians (like most people) think that computer science has something to do with computers.
@neil i declare a vested interest in academic HPC ($dayjob), but it's an absolute crap time to try and get any good deals from hardware vendors right now, especially with something as "small" as 36 million. AI speculation trading by the hyperscalers and wannabe hyperscalers has really stung the rest of us who want to do Real Science rather than draw silly pictures:-(
@neil I so detest this ... last year it was the Cambridge Supercomputer. This year it's the Cambridge AI System. It's the same fucking box (or the same fucking room full of racks full of boxes). Nothing has changed. It's not intelligent. There's nothing "AI" about this thing. Yet here we are, UK Govt AI Slop galore. So sad.
@neil not if I outbid them first !
@neil I reckon they could get 32GB if they don't use amazon but postage will be 4 million