Governments from Europe to Central Asia opt for supercomputers

On June 11, the U.K. government announced it would allocate up to £750 million (approximately $1 billion) toward a supercomputing project based in Edinburgh, Scotland, as part of the latest Spending Review. The move marks a turnaround from last August, when an £800 million initiative proposed by the then-governing Conservatives was dismissed by the current Labour administration, citing a lack of allocated funding, Sky News reported.

According to the document, the project’s goal is to build the most powerful supercomputer in the U.K. The government press release stated that the new machine will be integrated into the AI Research Resource — a network of high-performance computing systems designed to advance scientific and medical research. Early tests using existing systems in the network have already been applied to Alzheimer’s vaccine development and virtual testing of cancer treatments, simulating how potential drugs interact within the human body.

Although the specifications of the upcoming machine have not yet been disclosed, the press release pledges that it will «vastly exceed the capacity of the U.K.’s current national supercomputer, ARCHER2,» which is currently ranked 79th in the TOP500 global rankings.

Meanwhile, Kazakhstan, despite facing legal complications, obtained its own supercomputer in May, which authorities claim is the highest-performing system in Central Asia. The machine will reportedly deliver around two exaFLOPS intended for training neural networks across multiple areas by startups, universities and research centers.