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| The UKs fastest supercomputer gets £52million budget boost |
| Monday, April 03, 2006 at 18:55 by Darren Chew |
HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resource) project is said to be receiving an extra £52million investment Lord Sainsbury announced today.
With the launch of HECToR due in 2007, computing in the UK is going to be at an all time high. Initial reports predict HECToR will be running at an estimated 100 teraflops. The only thing even coming close to that at the moment is based at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts.
The research council's new supercomputer will be helping with various scientific studies ranging from climate control to earth science and even nano science. Although this supercomputer will be the fastest this country has to offer, reports indicate it might only just make it into the top 3 on the worlds fastest list.
Currently sitting in the top spot is the IBM BlueGene/L system in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) California. It has recently been ‘upgraded' to double its original size and has achieved a performance rating of 280.6 teraflops, being the first supercomputer to exceed the 100 teraflop mark.
Hectors project manager Jennifer Houghton said
'The HECToR project is not about building a bigger or better computer, but to help scientists design computer programs that can run on such a powerful system. The challenge of a big system like HECToR is being able to utilise its full capability'.
Until there can be more training offered to scientists HECToR is unlikely to be pushed to its limits. Part of the government funds are being poured in to training scientists and programmers to open the potential of this supercomputer.
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