RSS Feeds

Email a Friend Printer Friendly

Issued by the Medical Research Council Press Office on behalf of Research Councils UK (RCUK). UK Researchers and IBM to push back frontiers of science and engineering with biggest and fastest academic computer in Europe.

July 22, 2002

A supercomputer service capable of performing nearly seven trillion calculations every second and costing £53 million will be available for use by UK researchers by the end of the year, Research Councils UK (RCUK) announced. The new service will allow researchers to address some of the most challenging problems in science.

A six year contract to manage access to the new supercomputer has been agreed between the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and a consortium led by the University of Edinburgh, with the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils and IBM. Three of the Research Councils are contributing to the cost: the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Natural Environment Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

The service, which is planned to start in December, will be located at the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils's Daresbury Laboratory near Warrington. A joint team from the University of Edinburgh and the Daresbury Laboratory will manage the service and provide computational science and engineering support, which is vital to ensure the most effective use of the supercomputer. It will be based on IBM POWER 4 technology, and will provide an initial capability of 6.7 Teraflop/s (6.7 million million operations per second). This performance will be upgraded to more than 11 Teraflop/s in 2004 and to 22 Teraflop/s in 2006. It will be the largest high performance computer for academic use in Europe. The new computer is a key component in the UK e-science programme, it will be connected to the Research Councils` emerging new computing resources infrastructure, called the UK Grid and be available to a widening user community.

Lord Sainsbury of Turville, Minister for Science and Innovation said: "This project is an excellent example of what the UK can achieve. Services of this kind will ensure the most effective exploitation of science for economic and social benefit. The range of applications that high performance computing can be used for will potentially enable scientists to answer some of the greatest questions about the world in which we live".

Director-General of the Research Councils, Dr John Taylor said: "Everyone knows how important computers are in the world today and how much we rely on them to perform complex as well as routine tasks. High Performance Computing (HPC) will further what we know about an enormous range of subjects from the origins of the earth to how to specifically target drugs to those in need. More UK researchers will have access to a facility with greater problem solving capability, allowing them to acquire better understanding and answers to many of today's science challenges".

Some applications of this type of technology include:

Drug design - Tomorrow's drugs will be highly specific and finely targeted using supercomputers with teraflop capability. How individual molecules interact with proteins is already known but HPC will enable more molecules to be screened faster, so more potential chemical compounds can be tested for their ability to treat disease.

Flight simulation - At present only the air-flow around the wing of an aircraft can be simulated, but HPC can, potentially, enable the analysis of the entire flow around an aircraft. Better understanding of how turbulent the air is behind an aeroplane during take-off could mean greater use of air space, which would ease the control of traffic in the air.

Structure of the earth - The earth's core has a major impact on our lives, for example it shapes the magnetic field that protects us from the harmful effects of charged particles from the Sun. HPC techniques can be used to investigate the structure and behaviour of the core in a way that is impossible by direct observation and experiment.

Ends

Medical Research Council