Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what recent estimate her Department has made of the size of the UK's exascale supercomputing technology sector in comparison to that in (a) the United States, (b) Japan and (c) Europe.

At present, the UK does not have exascale capability. Exascale systems are at an early stage of deployment globally. The US’ first exascale system, Frontier, was brought online earlier this year. As for Japan and the EU, they have not reached exascale capability yet. The first EU’s exascale system, Jupiter, is expected to be deployed in 2023.

In September 2021, DCMS took on responsibility for coordination of activity and policy development for large-scale computing (LSC).

The Future of Compute review, independently led by Professor Zoubin Ghahramani, will build on the 2021 report by the Government Office for Science (Large-scale computing: the case for greater UK coordination) which set out the building blocks to creating a world-class computing ecosystem. The Future of Compute review will produce recommendations on the UKs compute capability over the next decade and the interventions required to ensure that UK researchers and businesses can fully exploit world-class compute infrastructure to support science, innovation and growth.

The Future of Compute review will contain an overview of the international advanced compute landscape. Ahead of the review’s publication, the Top500 list provides an up-to-date assessment of international compute capabilities and a ranking of the most powerful systems globally.

The review will be published in due course.