Giant supercomputer to go live

London: To the untrained eye, it looks like a sports hall half filled with neatly arranged burgundy Ikea storage units. But the series of heavy, clunking security doors that must be navigated to get inside, and the staff’s insistence on secrecy about its precise location, indicate that this is a place of national importance.

Meet the University of Edinburgh’s HECToR, Britain’s newest and faster supercomputer, which scientists and engineers plan to use for modelling everything from climate change to financial markets. The £113 million publicly funded project, the full name of which is High-End Computing Terascale Resource, will be opened officially later this month by the chancellor, Alistair Darling.

HECToR’s computing power is astonishing. Its calculation speed is equivalent to every person on the planet performing 10,000 calculations every second — in computing terms that is the same as 12,000 standard desktop computers operating at full tilt. HECToR’s memory is also impressive. It is 3,200 times larger than that of a top-of-the-range iPod 160GB.

According to Professor Arthur Trew, who is in charge of the project at a site in the Scottish countryside, supercomputers such as HECToR are allowing scientists to approach problems in a radically new way. Traditionally, science has advanced through theory and experiment — the theorists come up with testable ideas design experiments to see whether they are right. But for many areas of science this does not work.

One application is in aircraft design. By better understanding the flow of air across a wing, scientists are able to design shapes that will minimise drag and increase lift, making aircraft more efficient. Professor Jacek Gondzio at the University of Edinburgh plans to use HECToR to model financial markets. He is working on finding the safest and most profitable investment strategies for pension funds, based on uncertain information about the future of the world economy.