Industry needs to take risks on supercomputing, Rob Akers tells Adam Duckett

IF YOU’VE heard the term metaverse, it’s likely been linked to Facebook’s parent group rebranding itself as Meta and gambling on a near future where many of us slip on a pair of virtual reality (VR) googles to shop and share experiences in an immersive digital world. Love or loathe the idea, a suite of advanced technologies are converging to help bring this virtual vision to reality, and whether you plan to enter the metaverse during your own time, there’s a growing chance you will while at work.

To understand what this future might look like, I spoke to Rob Akers, director of computing programmes at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), who is using the industrial metaverse to accelerate engineering. “We’ve got a team of people working on everything from exascale supercomputing problems to artificial intelligence problems, effectively trying to work out how to design in silico [on computers] rather than have to do huge amounts of real-world testing,” Akers says.

Earlier this year, UKAEA, the University of Cambridge, and tech firms Dell and Intel joined forces, declaring the industrial metaverse essential for the development of the UK’s fusion prototype power plant, known as STEP, which is pushing to put power on the grid in the 2040s.

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