Edinburgh University reveals UK’s fastest supercomputer

Edinburgh University’s Advanced Computing Facility has unveiled Hector - the fastest supercomputer in the UK.

Hector (High-End Computing Terascale Resource) can carry out 63 trillion calculations per second; four times faster than its predecessor. This equates to every person on earth simultaneously carrying out 10,000 calculations per second.

Hector is the 17th most powerful computer in the world according to the Top500 listing.

The computer, which is partly funded by the UK Government, will cost £113 million over six years and is being developed by the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center, which operates Edinburgh University’s Advanced Computing Facility.

Hector will be used to study climate change models for the Walker Institute of the University of Reading.

The global climate models have been developed in Japan over the past three years, and Hector will now allow them to be run in the UK for the first time.

As well as forecasting the effect of climate change, Hector will also be used to project the spread of disease epidemics, and in the development of new medicines.

The computer uses a Cray XT4 system with software and application support provided by Numerical Algorithms Group.

Its power will be increased to 250 teraflops in October 2009, with a further upgrade due in 2011.

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