Scotland-based supercomputers ‘could discover new inhabitable planets'
| Hits: 151
By JENNY FYALL, 14 February 2012, The Scotsman
TO THE untrained eye, they may look like a row of large storage units covered in colourful children’s murals.
But scientists say Edinburgh’s new generation of £125 million supercomputers has the potential to discover new inhabitable planets, tackle climate change and even solve the global financial crisis.
The UK’s most powerful supercomputers, based in Edinburgh, have a combined power equivalent to every person on the planet carrying out 250,000 calculations per second all at the same time.
And the machines, known as HECToR and BlueGene, have entered a new phase in their development.
HECToR (High-End Computer Terascale Resources), Edinburgh’s original supercomputer, housed at Edinburgh University’s Advanced Computing Facility, is entering phase three of its life, with £13.9m new funding. It is already ten times as powerful as it was when it started out in 2008. READ....
By IND Web Design