The UK science industry must be given access to high-performance petascale computers as soon as possible to ensure the country’s economic competitiveness.
The Strategic Framework for High End Computing, published by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), says greater computing power is essential if the UK is to compete with countries such as Japan and the US, which already have petascale strategies.
A petascale computer can process at least one thousand trillion computations every second, four times the speed of the world’s current fastest machine, the IBM BlueGene/L.
Supercomputing power must keep increasing to give UK scientists the ability to conduct ever more complex experiments, in shorter timescales, says EPSRC high-end computing associate programme manager Emma Jones.
‘In the US and Japan there are already plans for petascale computers to be created soon, so it is something that has to be looked at very seriously,’ she said.
‘We have to do this to ensure that the UK remains internationally competitive.’
The report also identifies the need for the UK to work hard to retain the skilled individuals needed to operate high-end computing systems. The EPSRC plans to invest more money in skills retention.
‘There are many skilled people in the UK, but we need to make sure that they want to stay working in the UK rather than being tempted to move elsewhere,’ said Jones.
The advent of multi-core processors from companies such as Intel should make petascale computer systems more commonplace in the next few years, says Butler Group analyst Michael Azoff.
‘Next-generation chip technology offers us the possibility of massive growth in processing power, which will make petascale computers a practical possibility before long,’ he said.
‘Certainly we are less than 10 years from seeing this size of system becoming available for scientists to use.’
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