Meet HECToR, The British's Fastest Supercomputer

The Advanced Computer Facility at University of Edinburgh unveiled Britain's newest and faster supercomputer, HECRoR. HECToR aka High-End Computing Terascale Resourcecan handle 63 trillion calculations per second (teraflops) which is the equivalent processing power of every human performing 10,000 calculations per second or 12,000 desktop systems. It also has memory 3,200 times larger than that of a top-of-the-range iPod 160GB.

Photo Credit: Murdo MacLeod via theguradian

The £113m mammoth was built by the US manufacturer Cray Inc not for show and tell, but it's projected by scientist to do major calculation at their fields of research like the weather, climate change, ocean currents, superconductors and combustion engines. HecTOR is expected to raise its capacity to 250 teraflops in 2009 and future upgrade in 2011 to maintain its position as Europe most powerful Supercomputer.

photo credit : P. Tuffy via University of Edinburgh

HECToR is 17th at world-level position. Current most powerful supercomputer is housed at Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA. The BlueGene/L System, a joint venture of IBM, DOE and NNSA just received its upgrade 8 months ago to boost 280.6 teraflops to 478.2 teraflops.

Meet The Brain Of Britain [via dailyrecord.uk]top500