Three new supercomputers at Bristol University will transform research areas such as the structure of space and time, climate modelling and the design of novel drugs. At peak performance the multimillion-pound high-performance computers (HPCs) will do more than 13 trillion calculations a second, equivalent to the population of the world using hand-held calculators for about three hours.
In June, Bristol University announced the award of the contract to install the computers to a consortium led by ClusterVision, working with IBM and ClearSpeed Technology. The largest of the three HPCs will be one of the fastest university research computers in the UK, and is expected to be one of the top 100 computers of its type in the world. It will allow the university's physicists to be among the first to examine results from CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
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Compiled by Hannelore Hämmerle and Nicole Crémel