Via (JP-owned) Scotsman.com, news of the UK’s shiny new super computer, including a short video tour to give you some idea of the scale involved in this project:
Meet Hector, the most advanced supercomputer in the United Kingdom and a machine that can perform no fewer than 63 trillion calculations every second. Based at Edinburgh University’s Advanced Computing Facility, Hector, which stands for High-End Computing Terascale Resources, will be used by researchers at the cutting edge of their fields.
Professor Arthur Trew, director of the computing centre where Hector is beavering away, said:
“Hector has a performance of around 50 to 60 million million calculations per second. It’s necessary to have that speed because many of the problems it will investigate are very complex – from trying to study the earth’s climate, to better aircraft, to new drugs. The current UK national facility is called HPCX and is run by Edinburgh. Hector is four times faster.”
More: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scotland/Inside-the-lifesaving-60m-supercomputer.3671386.jp
