....you know.....HS2......

....you know.....modern computing.....

....must be true......we have bean counters who say that it is so!!!

Counter Example:

(1) The first Forth Road Bridge cost less than £30 million in 1964

(2) Treasury estimates show BILLIONS in revenue generated in Fife since 1964

....and only a few miles from the cancelled computer.....

False equivalence.

(and as an aside... HS2? Seriously? I was on the fence about it previously, but since the pandemic passenger numbers are way down. It's just not needed right now. Enough people have realised they don't need to travel as often to get stuff done.)

(Different AC)

Funny how the plans for pylons and pipes to get electricity and water into the Home Counties are going ahead. I've no doubt that whenever this exascale project gets resurrected it will end up in London, Oxford or Cambridge. Important People don't want to be traipsing about oop North y'know.

"Funny how the plans for pylons and pipes to get electricity and water into the Home Counties are going ahead"

Errmmmm...maybe that's where demand is, and supply is elsewhere, as part of policy decisions already made through the democratic process. And this business of long infrastructure lines has always been the case - Birmingham City Council had to build some very big pipes 73 miles to Wales to secure reliable, safe drinking water, and that was in 1896, Liverpool did something similar. The UK national grid was conceived in 1926, to address the fact that electricity system was fragmented and inefficient, and the then-sources of coal were a very long way from most of Britain's cities.

"I've no doubt that whenever this exascale project gets resurrected...."

We've yet to see any credible evidence of the benefits of exascale computing, and throwing a billion quid at the matter just because everybody else is doing it seem pointless, especially as the public finances are in a very sorry state. By all means let's see it resurrected when somebody's found a use beyond national willy-waving.

"....it will end up in London, Oxford or Cambridge"

Why? Labour want to hang on to all the Scottish votes they recently acquired thanks to the SNP's self-immolation. And Edinburgh is a fairly obvious choice aside from politics - the Uni already have one of the UK's most powerful computers, along with globally recognised strengths in information technology and commercialisation thereof. London should be a non-starter for reasons of cost, energy supply and no need for public bungs, Oxford should be out because Cambridge is better at science, and Cambridge should be out because (along with Oxford) they're all research focused egg heads who have plentiful funding anyway*.

* If anybody is not offended by my generalisations there, then do get in touch and I'll see what I can do. Disclosure: I'm not Scottish, neither affiliation nor animosity to any of the seats of learning mentioned.

* If anybody is not offended by my generalisations there, then do get in touch and I'll see what I can do. Disclosure: I'm not Scottish, neither affiliation nor animosity to any of the seats of learning mentioned.

I am Scottish with links to all the universities you mention and I endorse your message.

Perhaps a petition should be started to rename DSIT to the Department of Science, Innovation and Silly Technology, or DeSIST.

Ignore the artificial idiot hype, and do it properly.

Ignore the artificial idiot hype, and do it properly.

By properly.. I have a modest proposal. Implement an AI Tax whereby every time a company mentions AI, they're taxed say, £100. There may soon be funding for a superdoopercomputer.

Otherwise it seems to become a simple business case. Why does Edinburgh need £1bn in tin, other than to maybe claim a spot in the supercomputer rankings? What could it do that couldn't be done in a rack of CPU or GPUs? Especially when for AI to become useful, it needs to be possible in something that costs considerably less than £1bn.

Which I guess is the usual challenge with research funding. Demonstrate some practical benefits in exchange for public money. ISTR Edinburgh became a supercomputer centre mainly on the back of oil & gas, which Labour's in the process of banning. And I guess that challenge also extends to researchers putting together proposals to try and book time on any supercomputers to conduct their own experiments. At least good'ol RACF made that somewhat easier in the good'ol mainframe days we're recreating with all the cloudybollocks and AI hype.

Peter Kyle MP, boss of DSIT with his doctorate in "community development" is a champion of AI and wants to force tech firms to share their test and training data with the government.

At this rate he will force the tech firms offshore.

I'm old enough to be reminded of Harold Wilson and his "white heat of technology" looking around for a big, advanced tech project to cancel.

Bye-bye Inmos, nobody needs a transputer!

That was later. I suspect its problems were too expensive and just too different for the industry to handle.

Wilson's statement of his true colours was cancellation of TSR2.

Yeah, because if he hadn't cancelled it we might have won the Cold War. Oh, hang on ...

Fair enough, memory blurry, I was a lot younger then, just looking to go start an engineering degree as pretty much the whole industry (MOD aside) was being cancelled or sold off.

I grew up with talk of concorde, harrier jump jets, blue streak, polaris, fast breeder reactors, microcomputers.

France & Germany managed to keep their engineering industries & prestige projects; we just gave up/sold out (Thatcher).

All the big defence projects were cancelled the decade before under Labour, but don't let that stop you blaming every wrong decision in history on Thatcher.

everything leading to now comes from thatchers short term profit taking and selling the countries assets.

Tories do this shit every time to fill their own pockets.

As opposed to the Labour party, who for example instructed Rolls Royce to ship then state of the art jet engines to Russia back in 1946. According to current RR employees, these were never paid for, and the sale was a government instruction. Nothing like helping your enemies out with free technology.

Those engines went to become not just the foundation of Russia's military engine industry, but China's.

Thatcher converted us to servile industries by selling off _civilian_ assets, and ignoring engineering altogether - I have never aspired to work in defence myself, I am just saying what was there when I was younger. The labour party has been a huge disappointment over the years, but nothing compared to the sheer malice of the tories and those they bribed with tax cuts.

I'm not sure the extent to which government investment makes a lot of difference.

The last major technology player to emerge around a University was ARM - and I think that had a lot more to do with the individuals than the University itself. There certainly wasn't a lot of investment in the Computer Lab at that time. And ARM grew too big for UK investment to sustain. That, ultimately, is the gotcha.

What grew out of Cambridge University was Acorn Computers, the inventor of the Acorn RISC Machine.

ARM is an interesting development that out-lived it's parent.

And I am sure there will be lots more cuts to come. As a country we have a bad financial situation and leaders with spending problems (or problems with not spending).

"As a country we have a bad financial situation and leaders with spending problems (or problems with not spending)."

No, we have a democracy problem - people want public services like Denmark, and taxes like Chad, so that's what politicians promise them, unfortunately it cannot be done. There's nothing inherently wrong with either a big state, nor with a small state, nor even with an occasional large budget deficit, or a chronic but very low deficit. Unfortunately successive British governments have given us chronic large deficits.

The average budget deficit over the past fifty odd years is 3.7% of GDP, it needs to be nearer 1% to minimise the problem of debt taking up ever increasing amounts of government spending. The UK is in exactly that problem place now - that government has to spend £89bn on debt interest, and therefore has to curtail current and capital spending, yet is increasing the debt pile by around £1bn a week as of this year.

Tax take is around 41% of GDP last year, if we take that to 44% of GDP, we would close the deficit to around 1% (I'm mixing some current-ish and average figures hear, bear with the argument). However, that 44% tax take means an overall increase of 7.3% in tax, we already know that's not happening. Or we can both raise taxes and cut spending, but where is there any national consensus as to where we can save (say) half the amount required through cuts - that 50% would be around £50bn reduction in government spending each and every year. There's only so many things the population will accept cutting, although super-computers for academia are one, of course. I'm sure individually we could nominate £50bn of recurring cuts (bear in mind that still requires a permanent 3.6% rise in taxes), but the challenge is getting a national consensus - my £50bn of cuts won't be popular with many other people. And regardless of people, politicians have their own agendas where they turn a tin ear even to their own voters.