U.K.'s fastest supercomputer unveiled

by Marco Chiappetta — Sunday, March 02, 2008, 03:00 PM EDT

If you thought that quad-core rig of yours was fast, wait until you see what the folks at the University of Edinburgh's Advanced Computer Facility have just unveiled...

"Hector -- or the High-End Computing Terascale Resource -- can handle 63 trillion calculations per second, which is the equivalent processing power of 12,000 desktop systems and four times faster than its predecessor. The amount of calculations the system can handle is equivalent to every person on earth simultaneously carrying out 10,000 calculations per second.

The supercomputer is based at the University of Edinburgh's Advanced Computer Facility near the Scottish capital and will cost $221.3 million (113 million pounds) over six years. The facility will be operated by the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center (EPCC)."

The article also states that an upgrade to Hector is already planned that should increase its number crunching ability to 250 teraflops by October 2009. And an additional upgrade is due two years later to further improve performance. Sounds pretty fast. I sure wish these guys would join our folding team.

Tags: U.K., LED, supercomputer, test, computer, super, fast, unveil, COM, K, ile

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com