Purchasing a new national “supercomputer”, which could cost in the region of €60 million, is a priority, said Minister for Further Education and Research James Lawless.
Irish researchers have been renting time on an outsourced computer, which has cost the Government more than €5 million since December 2023, according to figures from his department.
The outsourced arrangement is an interim measure while a departmental panel reviews the cost of purchasing a new one.
The supercomputer is used by the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), based at the University of Galway, to run highly complex data processing tasks for clients such as Met Éireann, the Central Statistics Office and Science Foundation Ireland.
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Mr Lawless, who holds a master’s in supercomputing, told The Irish Times this week that purchasing a supercomputer is a priority as it would be a “significant national asset”. The Minister said a spend of €60 million “wouldn’t be unexpected”.
ICHEC was in June 2022 awarded competitive funding from the European Union for a new supercomputer called CASPIr (Computational Analysis and Simulation Platform for Ireland).
Mr Lawless said the availability of this funding “has changed over the past 18 months”, but he would seek to “maximise the drawdown of any available funding from the EU and our own national resources”.
His interest in securing a supercomputer was reinforced by a trip in late July to view the world’s biggest supercomputer housed in the RIKEN research centre in Japan, which he described as “off the scale”.
The State’s new computer “may not be in the RIKEN scale, because that is the world’s leading global giant, but it certainly would be worthy of its status”, said Mr Lawless.
The procurement process for the supercomputer could take another year.
Over the past 21 months, ICHEC has been renting time on Luxembourg’s supercomputer, called LuxProvide’s MeluXina, which is part of the EU’s network of supercomputers. This arrangement has cost the Government an average of €1.63 million each year since 2023, the Department of Further Education and Research said in response to queries.
Until November 2023, ICHEC researchers were using an Irish supercomputer named Kay. It was decommissioned when the warranty ran out and it became obsolete. Three national supercomputers preceded Kay since ICHEC’s establishment in 2005.
The director of ICHEC, Jean-Christophe Desplat, said high-performance computing is “a cornerstone of modern scientific inquiry, technological advancement and economic competitiveness”.
Mr Lawless further expects the national supercomputer to be used for international quantum and AI computing projects.
Enda O’Brien, computational scientist at ICHEC, said the team’s climate simulations, which project future temperatures and weather in Ireland as carbon emissions rise, “are very computer intensive”.
“There is constant demand for finer resolution, more physics and larger ensembles ... which means that the demands on computing are just going up proportionally.”
In addition to running up costs, computing climate and weather projections on the Luxembourg computer is “a bit of a pain”, said Mr O’Brien.
The Irish centre is allocated a certain amount of computing capacity each month, he said, adding that it is “easy to run out of that by the 20th of the month”.
“Then you’re kind of twiddling your thumbs for the last 10 days. And there’s tight limitations on storage and on the file count. If we had our own system, those limitations wouldn’t be there.
“If we had [CASPIr] today, our work would go a lot faster and we could do a lot more”, said Mr O’Brien.
“You can say the ICHEC staff are looking forward to a new supercomputer for Ireland to increase our productivity and open our horizons,” he said.
