# UK exascale in trouble

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739>\
**Category:** Offtopic\
**Created:** [August 28, 2024, 9:32pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739 "2024-08-28T21:32:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 20\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![PetrKryslUCSD](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/petrkryslucsd/32/215825_2.png) [@PetrKryslUCSD](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/PetrKryslUCSD)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2024, 9:32pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/1 "2024-08-28T21:32:30Z")

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The Economist reports that the UK supercomputer (exascale) will probably not get finished.

As they report:  
_The government insists it remains committed to supercomputing. Ministers are expected to announce alternative proposals in a budget due on October 30th. Under the previous government’s plans, the Edinburgh project would have eaten up much of the available investment; some experts thought the scheme was too focused on traditional scientific simulations, rather than on AI._

Right. So instead of on science, let’s focus on burning money on a silly technology to generate text full of misleading statements and confabulations, and images of six-fingered orange men.

Edit: Someone apparently thought the illustration was an “advertisement” (!?).  
This complete lack of the human characteristic of understanding a joke makes me think that perhaps the post was flagged by an AI?

Image hence removed. We don’t want to piss off the first sentient AI. Anyway, if you want to see the six-fingered praying orange man online, go for it. Hilarious.

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**Author:** ![system](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/1/2/12829a7ba92b924d4ce81099cbf99785bee9b405.png) [@system](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/system)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2024, 10:07pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/2 "2024-08-28T22:07:41Z")

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**Author:** ![Palli](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/palli/32/3380_2.png) [@Palli](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Palli)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2024, 10:12pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/3 "2024-08-28T22:12:38Z")

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It’s not unusual since only 2 exaflop computers.

[https://www.top500.org/statistics/sublist/](https://www.top500.org/statistics/sublist/)

UK is well, after Finland 5th (0.38 exaflops), Italy, Spain 8th, and China 13th 0.093 exaflops, France 17th 0.057 EFLOPS

I suppose all those other European EU funded, and UK no longer there.

Your answer even marked offtopic for offtopic, wasn’t while I prepared my answer. Since your delisted, I couldn’t send you a private message (on the post at least), so I’m not actually sure you (or anyone) sees this…

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**Author:** ![PetrKryslUCSD](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/petrkryslucsd/32/215825_2.png) [@PetrKryslUCSD](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/PetrKryslUCSD)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2024, 10:14pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/4 "2024-08-28T22:14:48Z")

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China apparently has two exaflop computers under cover. UK used to be second in the world. Now it does not even rank.

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**Author:** ![system](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/1/2/12829a7ba92b924d4ce81099cbf99785bee9b405.png) [@system](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/system)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2024, 10:38pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/5 "2024-08-28T22:38:19Z")

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**Author:** ![dawbarton](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/dawbarton/32/215461_2.png) [@dawbarton](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/dawbarton)\
**Post date:** [August 28, 2024, 11:25pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/6 "2024-08-28T23:25:54Z")

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That article sounds more positive than the earlier news reports which suggested the Edinburgh machine was completely cut from the budget. Fortunately, there is still Isambard-AI being built in University of Bristol (initial phase is up and running), which _might_ get the UK back into the top ten - for a few months at least…

(And, despite the name, I suspect it’ll be used for a good amount of traditional science.)

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**Author:** ![rafael.guerra](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/rafael.guerra/32/216610_2.png) [@rafael.guerra](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/rafael.guerra)\
**Post date:** [August 29, 2024, 12:01am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/7 "2024-08-29T00:01:08Z")

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> [@PetrKryslUCSD](#):
>
> the six-fingered praying orange man online

🙂 AI rocks!

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**Author:** ![Tamas\_Papp](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/tamas_papp/32/25949_2.png) [@Tamas\_Papp](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Tamas_Papp)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2024, 11:37am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/8 "2024-08-30T11:37:02Z")

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> [@PetrKryslUCSD](#):
>
> Right. So instead of on science, let’s focus on burning money on a silly technology to generate text full of misleading statements and confabulations, and images of six-fingered orange men.

To be fair, as a taxpayer the benefits of exascale computing are not clear to me either. Please don’t get me wrong:

1. as a nerd I find the project super exciting,

2. I am not implying that the benefits do not exist, just that it is really hard to find a cost/benefit analysis.

Also, note that “AI” is tagged onto every grant proposal these days where it is even remotely applicable (an usually means ML, not AI). Take for example this [recent highlight from the Exascale Computing Project](https://www.exascaleproject.org/exascale-computing-project-contributes-to-accelerating-cancer-research/), it reads like someone inserted “AI driven” at random spots. So it may just be a relabeling.

Time for my (AI-driven) coffee break ☕

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**Author:** ![Palli](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/palli/32/3380_2.png) [@Palli](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Palli)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2024, 12:05pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/9 "2024-08-30T12:05:50Z")

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This post was temporarily hidden by the community for possibly being off-topic, unfocused, inappropriate, or spammy.

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**Author:** ![rafael.guerra](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/rafael.guerra/32/216610_2.png) [@rafael.guerra](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/rafael.guerra)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2024, 12:09pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/10 "2024-08-30T12:09:29Z")

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> [@Tamas\_Papp](#):
>
> as a taxpayer the benefits of exascale computing are not clear to me

British taxpayers do care about the weather and will have no reason to complain about its forecast when exascale computing makes it hyper-local and absolutely accurate.

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**Author:** ![Palli](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/palli/32/3380_2.png) [@Palli](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Palli)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2024, 12:14pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/11 "2024-08-30T12:14:12Z")

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We already have AI/neural network weather forecast. It’s supposedly more accurate, at least for local weather conditions AND another upside is say lower compute, so exascale not needed.

> **[GraphCast: AI model for faster and more accurate global weather forecasting](https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/graphcast-ai-model-for-faster-and-more-accurate-global-weather-forecasting/)**
>
> Our state-of-the-art model delivers 10-day weather predictions at unprecedented accuracy in under one minute

> In a paper published in Science, we introduce GraphCast, a state-of-the-art AI model able to make medium-range weather forecasts with unprecedented accuracy.

I’m not even sure if any weather modeling is done on a petascale computer (historically), or what the largest one is. The UK MET office, and similar for other countries is way down the list, down to 131st on the list (from 3rd in 1997):

[https://top500.org/site/49064/](https://top500.org/site/49064/)

Way behind Korea Meteorological Administration (highest ranked MET office onless I missed something) at 58th (previously in 2021 ranked 24th), 18 PFLOPS, 0.018 exaflops:

[https://top500.org/system/179912/](https://top500.org/system/179912/)

These large computers always seem to be DoE related, I at least often saw nuclear weapons testing as a claimed application in the past, for the US ones.

> **[How U.S. nuclear testing moratorium launched a supercomputing revolution](https://discover.lanl.gov/news/0929-supercomputing-revolution/)**
>
> Explore everything Los Alamos is doing

[https://2009-2017.state.gov/t/avc/rls/202014.htm](https://2009-2017.state.gov/t/avc/rls/202014.htm)

> You can learn more about supercomputing and nuclear weapons from these videos from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA):  
> NNSA Supercomputers Part 1: About ASC and Our Supercomputers  
> NNSA Supercomputers Part 2: Hardware, Software, Codes and Data  
> NNSA Supercomputers Part 3: Non-nuclear Success

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**Author:** ![Tamas\_Papp](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/tamas_papp/32/25949_2.png) [@Tamas\_Papp](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Tamas_Papp)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2024, 12:28pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/12 "2024-08-30T12:28:17Z")

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> [@rafael.guerra](#):
>
> will have no reason to complain about its forecast

So the project deprives them from a form of mild entertainment?

But surely, there must be benefits too 😉

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**Author:** ![yvikhlya](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/yvikhlya/32/3753_2.png) [@yvikhlya](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/yvikhlya)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2024, 12:31pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/13 "2024-08-30T12:31:01Z")

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> [@Palli](#):
>
> Right, what kind of computation needs exascale?

Ensemble weather/climate forecasts for instance. Each forecast is highly scalable to multiple cpus and we need many of them in the ensemble to get statistics right and all of them need to run on the same cluster. We are currently not even near the resolution which resolves essential physical processes in the atmosphere/ocean.

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**Author:** ![Palli](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/palli/32/3380_2.png) [@Palli](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Palli)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2024, 12:34pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/14 "2024-08-30T12:34:16Z")

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> [@yvikhlya](#):
>
> Ensemble weather/climate forecasts for instance.

Doesn’t that mean you can run, hypothetically on a separate computer (shared data, so might not want to)? Also you ignored how low on the list the MET offices are, recent advances over traditional, I mentioned, and likely limit of data to put in. We in Iceland care very much about the weather, up to some limit of how we can afford to spend on it. We have the largest air-control area in the world, so we do not just predict the weather for ourselves.

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**Author:** ![yvikhlya](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/yvikhlya/32/3753_2.png) [@yvikhlya](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/yvikhlya)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2024, 12:36pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/15 "2024-08-30T12:36:18Z")

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> [@Palli](#):
>
> We already have AI/neural network weather forecast. It’s supposedly more accurate, at least for local weather conditions AND another upside is say lower compute, so exascale not needed.

This is a wrong statement. GraphCast is a nice try, but it is not a panacea. We still need to run full GCM to produce data to train something like GraphCast and in reality it is not that great as some say. NN is good to approximate subgridscale physics, but the climate model still needs a dynamical core.

P.S. At NASA, climate modelling and data assimilation is the biggest user of HPC cluster resources, and it is still not enough.

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**Author:** ![Palli](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/palli/32/3380_2.png) [@Palli](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Palli)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2024, 12:40pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/16 "2024-08-30T12:40:38Z")

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You do not support that exascale is needed for the weather (far from done at least, see the Korea Meteorological Administration computer I quoted, and the way smaller UK MET one, I’m not sure, could even the former have dual use for something non-weather related? Or maybe for climate). Maybe for climate, a different kind of simulation, didn’t look into that.

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**Author:** ![lmiq](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/lmiq/32/18314_2.png) [@lmiq](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/lmiq)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2024, 12:41pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/17 "2024-08-30T12:41:54Z")

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> [@Tamas\_Papp](#):
>
> So the project deprives them from a form of mild entertainment?

Certainly a joke, but actually forecasts are enormously important for agriculture.

I’m not sure if these computers are actually used for that, though, or if for forecasting other dedicated machines are used. I think here (in Brazil) forecasting uses dedicated machines, not the clusters that are available for general usage.

I also wonder which are the applications that actually use that computer power (instead of using it for fragmented small projects).

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**Author:** ![yvikhlya](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/yvikhlya/32/3753_2.png) [@yvikhlya](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/yvikhlya)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2024, 12:46pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/18 "2024-08-30T12:46:29Z")

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> [@Palli](#):
>
> You do not support that exascale is needed for the weather (far from done at least, see the Korea Meteorological Administration computer I quoted, and the way smaller UK MET one, I’m not sure, could even the former have dual use for something non-weather related? Or maybe for climate). Maybe for climate, a different kind of simulation, didn’t look into that.

People use resources which are available to them. Less resources available, coarser resolution models they run, less forecast accuracy they have. Current climate models do not resolve a lot of essential physics and ensemble sizes are not very large statistically. Yeah, you can live with this, it all depends on how much are you willing to pay to gain extra few % in forecast accuracy, but the demand in computing power exists.

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**Author:** ![johnh](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/johnh/32/3615_2.png) [@johnh](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/johnh)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2024, 1:08pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/19 "2024-08-30T13:08:35Z")

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> [@lmiq](#):
>
> I also wonder which are the applications that actually use that computer power (instead of using it for fragmented small projects).

At the US National Labs these would be referred to as Leadership class jobs  
[https://docs.olcf.ornl.gov/systems/frontier\_user\_guide.html](https://docs.olcf.ornl.gov/systems/frontier_user_guide.html)

Here is a article on a LAMMPS simulation running on 9200 nodes

> **[Breaking benchmarks: Frontier supercomputer sets new standard in molecular...](https://www.ornl.gov/news/breaking-benchmarks-frontier-supercomputer-sets-new-standard-molecular-simulation)**

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**Author:** ![lmiq](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/lmiq/32/18314_2.png) [@lmiq](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/lmiq)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2024, 1:17pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/uk-exascale-in-trouble/118739/20 "2024-08-30T13:17:55Z")

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> [@johnh](#):
>
> Here is a article on a LAMMPS simulation running on 9200 nodes

Well, that’s the kind of usage that is only for show up and test the machine.

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