The debacle is a reminder that the way the UK planned to surf the wave of computing developments has been a stop-go shambles. By comparison, the US, Europe, Germany, China, Japan, Singapore and Australia (the last two working together) have spent more than a decade diligently planning for the exascale supercomputer revolution. The UK has recently and very belatedly joined EuroHPC, a multibillion-euro high-performance computing programme that aims to create a European supercomputing ecosystem. We have had plenty of tardy reviews of UK computing infrastructure and do not need another. Peter Coveney is director of the Centre for Computational Science at UCL and Roger Highfield is science director of the Science Museum.
