Meet the computer than can make a million billion calculations a second
A new £43m supercomputer that is capable of over one million billion calculations a second, is to be unveiled at the National Museum of Scotland on Tuesday.
The Academic Research Computing High End Resource (Archer) is intended to provide high performance computing support for research and industry projects in the UK.
The government said Archer would help researchers carry out calculations in areas ranging from simulating the earth's climate to designing novel materials.
Archer was provided by Cray, which is funded and owned by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
The new system has more than triple the speed of the HECToR supercomputer that it replaces. Made of twin rows of black steel cabinets Archer will be supported by the UK Research Data Facility.
The facility will be able to support big data applications and the government boasted that the Archer system will be among the greenest supercomputers in the world. The cooling costs will reach eight pence for every pound spent on power.
Professor David Delpy, CEO of the EPSRC, said:
EPSRC is proud to unveil this new Archer service. It will enable researchers in engineering and the physical sciences to continue to be at the forefront of computational science developments and make significant contributions in the use of Big Data to improve understanding across many fields and develop solutions to global challenges.
Here is a small sample of Britain's most recent supercomputers.
HECToR
This supercomputer is the predecessor to ARCHER and is a Cray XE6 with 30 cabinets with processors of 16-core totalling over 90,000 cores. The first phase of HECToR came online in 2007and was upgraded in 2011.
HPCx
Was a supercomputer located in Cheshire and maintained by the HPCx consortium. When it was originally commissioned in 2002 it was designated as one of the top ten largest computers in the world.
QCDOC
The Quantum ChromoDynamics on a Chip (QCDOC) is custom made to solve problems in quantum physics. The computer was jointly designed by the University of Edinburgh and Colombia University. The QCDSP strapped 12.288 nodes to a 4D network and reached 1 Tflops in 1998.