Hardware (5192)

Britain's fastest super machine unveiled

A computer called Hector

15 January 2008 12:13 GMT / By Katie Scott

Housed in 60 wardrobe-sized cabinets in the University of Edinburgh is HECToR.

This supercomputer boasts the power of 12,000 desktop PCs and can make 63 million calculations each second.

It cost a mere £113m, but is expected to be able to help us answer some of the biggest conundrums of our day from climate change, developing new medicines, building tiny parts for advanced computers to making warplanes less visible to radar.

HECToR, which stands for High-End Computing Terascale Resource, was made the US manufacturer Cray Inc.

Despite its vast power, Britain's HECToR falls some way short of the world's biggest computer, Blue Gene/L, which is, (and no surprises here), housed in the US.

Full tags

Hardware, Desktop PCs, HECToR