Rise of the speed machines

In the frigid bowels of a nondescript building outside Southampton, twelve racks of blinking green lights mark the location of one of the fastest computers in the UK.

“It is basically the equivalent of four thousand traditional desktop computers all linked together,” said Dr Oz Parchment, the Universityof Southampton’s IT infrastructure manager.

Iridis 3, as it is known, is capable of performing 72 trillion calculations per second (seventy-two teraflops), making it the fastest supercomputer to be exclusively owned and run by a UK university.

Since coming online in November of last year, the machine has been operating at more than 90% capacity, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

It is one of a growing number of high-performance machines around the UK.

“Almost every university in the country has a respectable cluster of its own,” said Stephen Booth of the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, which houses Hector, the UK’s fastest machine.

The machine is a “national facility”, which means that it is used by researchers from around the country.

Hector packs more than 40,000 chips and can crunch through 174 trillion calculations per second.

It is largely used for physical and chemical simulations, but has also helped scientists understand how dinosaurs moved, how the shape of an aircraft affects the noise it makes and how turbulence affects the world’s oceans.

“We tend to focus on the big stuff you can’t do elsewhere,” said Dr Booth.