£145 million investment in e-infrastructure
This will drive growth and innovation across a range of sectors that rely heavily on computing including manufacturing, engineering and design…
This will drive growth and innovation across a range of sectors that rely heavily on computing including manufacturing, engineering and design. It will also provide industry with the latest technology and facilities, giving reassurance that Britain is a great place to do business and encouraging further private sector support.
Universities and Science Minister David Willetts said:
“Significantly improving computing infrastructure is vital to driving growth and giving businesses the confidence to invest in the UK. It has the potential to significantly improve the design and manufacturing process, encouraging innovation across a whole range of sectors.
“The investment will also be of enormous benefit to our world-class research base. It will enable universities to carry out highly sophisticated research and archive more data, keeping us at the very leading edge of science.”
Intel Director for Public Sector Tristan Wilkinson said:
“Intel has long believed that you need to invest your way out of a recession and this announcement reflects our philosophy. We naturally welcome the Government’s announcement to make a significant investment in high-performance computing, a technology that is at the leading edge of computing, innovation, and growth. This signals a clear commitment to a future that embraces science, research and technology, and provides confidence for industry to invest in Britain.”
IBM UK and Ireland Chief Executive Stephen Leonard said:
“Today’s announcement of a government e-infrastructure investment provides valuable stimulus that has impact far wider than the technology sector. This aligns closely with IBM’s Smarter Planet agenda. We believe that technology infrastructure investment will stimulate a smarter approach to addressing challenges such as city infrastructure, public safety, transport and energy while also providing broader economic, environmental and societal benefit.”
The following areas will benefit from the investment:
Software development
Computer power
Data storage
Wide bandwidth networks
Cyber security and authentication
People and skills
This builds on investment announced in the Budget for supercomputing facilities at Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus in Cheshire, putting it at the forefront of software research and development.
This draws on work being done Professor Dominic Tildesley from Unilever to identify priority areas for future investment in the UK’s computing infrastructure.
Notes to editors
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The Government has today, in addition to the ring-fenced science budget, ‘earmarked’ capital funding of £145m for High Performance Computing and e-infrastructure subject to approval of the full business case being developed by the Research Councils.
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Additional resource cost will be determined during the development of the business case.
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HPC is the use of powerful processors, networks and parallel supercomputers to tackle problems that are very computer or data-intensive. The same HPC techniques can be used to program the largest supercomputers containing hundreds of thousands of processors, or to exploit the full potential of a multi-core laptop.
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The Daresbury Campus in Cheshire is one of the two national science and innovation campuses, the other being at Harwell in Oxfordshire. Daresbury is home to the UK’s largest multidisciplinary Computer Science and Engineering group.
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Notes to Editors
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