www.eenewseurope.com, Jun. 11, 2025 –
The UK government is allocating $1bn (£750m) for a next generation AI supercomputer to be based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
A previous supercomputer project was cancelled when the current administration come to power. This was announced at the end of 2023 to replace the current 28 petaFLOP ARCHER2 system from HPE Cray. This has 5,860 compute nodes, each with dual AMD EPYC 7742 64-core processors at 2.25GHz, giving 750,080 cores in total.
The previous plan was for the replacement to have 50 times the performance of ARCHER2 system, targeting 1.3 exaFLOPS. However the world has moved on, and the latest leading supercomputer el Capitan in the US, has a performance of 1.74 exaFLOPS.
The highest performance UK machine, Isambard AI in Bristol, is a better benchmark. This is in the top five machines in Europe, a modular, liquid cooled HPE Cray EX2500 supercomputer with over 5280 GH200 GraceHopper chips for a performance of 278 petaFLOPS.The specification of ‘Archer AI’ will be part of the ‘Compute Strategy’ to be announced in the next few months, but is likely to be based on Nvidia’s VeraRubin superchip to get the stated performance boost. This would be similar to the Doudna system in the US and Blue Lion in Germany, which is also built by HPE Cray and scheduled to come online in early 2027.
This is part of £2bn for the AI action plan announced as part of the spending review today to to scale up the country’s AI compute power twenty-fold by 2030.
”Basing the UK’s most powerful supercomputer in Edinburgh, Scotland will now be a major player in driving forward the next breakthroughs that put our Plan for Change into action,” said UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology, Peter Kyle. “Strong investment in our science and technology sector is part of our Plan for Change to kickstart economic growth, and as the home of the UK’s largest supercomputer, Scotland will be an integral part of that journey.”