Super Computers

Super computers are pretty cool.  They are computers that can make trillions of calculations a second (teraflops) and can do them for all sorts of things from weather prediction to defence issues. The thing is supercomputer are going to be more and more needed when we look at the world now.  The massive amount of data that is coming in from the world, Britain needs to get more computing power (I think anyway) So what has been done on this matter?

A quick search through the pile found LITERALLY nothing for the search term “Super computer”. Hold on, just did another search and, again, nothing.  Great eh?  I’m a pioneer on this topic!  So what can we gather from this?  That no one other than me is interested in this, at the moment. The reasons that this is so interesting is because of this report from the BBC.  China building the biggest supercomputer?  Why can't Britain do the same?

Well, I asked the Cabinet office:

Please can you tell me if your department has any plans, or made any investment, into supercomputers since 01/01/15 until time of writing.

And the answer came back no.  Which is slightly surprising, because I would have thought that they might have discussed this issue with other departments.  Maybe that should have been a slightly different request, but never mind.

So I asked the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills the same question.  The answer came back yes. The actual answer was:

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has invested in High Performance Computing (HPC) at the Met Office. This totalled £97m across 15/16 and 16/17. The Met Office HPC business case was based on benefits of £2 billion over 5 years to the economy from the investment, a return on investment of 14 to 1.

Told you that it can help with the weather, didn't I? The link for more information is here.  The really interesting thing is that this was done for cost cutting too.  Why would this help to cut costs?  Again that is another FoI request for another time. However the thing that is really interesting is to think that the UK is trying to be one of the best for Weather and Climate science.  The reason that I say this is that very recently (At time of writing) the government has closed the Department of Energy & Climate Change (Well, been rolled into other departments).

The thing that comes to me, as I write this, is which other departments could do with some super computing. China used their super computer for defence purposes.  Could the Ministry of defence need some assistance?  Would the Civil Aviation Authority need some help too?  Only time will tell.