Here at Welsh Icons we have been receiving statements and press releases all day on the £40 million pound supercomputer project that can ‘save’ the Welsh economy. All the buzz words seem to be there: ‘fast-track’, ‘economic renewal’, ‘data mining’, ‘distributed’, ‘sustainable’, ‘inward investment’ etc.
It is also claimed that the project will create 400 jobs.
The project will be based at Cardiff and Swansea Universities and linked to spokes at Aberystwyth, Bangor and Glamorgan Universities, University of Wales Alliance Universities and Technium business innovation centres around Wales so they’ve told us.
We were told:
“One key objective of ERP is to adjust our £240m economic development budget so that it’s focused more on developing the right skills for our workforce and to encourage world-class research and development– which mirror the objectives of HPC Wales.”
and the University of Glamorgan excitedly told us:
“One such project is Glamorgan’s work with Global Combustion Systems, a British burner manufacturer, and GdF Suez, a French gas supplier, to help them improve the efficiency of their furnaces and reduce their pollutant emissions.
“Quite simply, work which could take us up to a week currently could be done in less than an hour. The difference in computer power is that dramatic and it will open up a whole host of new horizons for us.”
So what is it going to give us? Our head ‘techie’ at Welsh Icons told us:
“£40 million pounds over 5 years is not much money for such an ambitious project. I’ve had 32 years experience of using high-powered computer systems and have worked for companies that would spend much more than this over a similar period just to keep their in-house testing facilities up-to date.
“In the old days it was simple, you went to a mainframe manufacturer such as IBM or Cray and purchased the fastest machine you could afford. Then came the Transputer chip and that changed the way people started to think about things. A while ago one of the fastest machines on the planet was just a collection of Apple Mac G5s all connected together.
“Next came the blade systems when you’d just put thousands of cards each containing one or more ‘domestic’ computers into a series of cabinets and connect them together. Even the big players like HP and IBM have now adopted this approach.
“Now there is a new paradigm, The Cloud. Cloud computing is where tens or even of hundreds of computers share their resources over the Internet.
“I’m not really sure what the project is trying to achieve but with such a small budget it looks doomed to fail. As far as I can see the staffing costs and the communications infrastructure required would swallow the budget within the first year or two.”
What do you think? Please leave your comments in the section below.
