Meet HECToR – the UK's fastest computer
HECToR is that room full of 60 cabinets to the left there. The cabinets are all linked up. Together they make one of Europe’s fastest supercomputers.
HECToR apparently has the power of 12,000 standard desktop PCs (or 250,000 if you base it on the one I’m using at the moment) and is now officially the UK’s fastest supercomputer. So as well as getting Crysis running at a really good frame rate with all of the details and anti-aliasing turned to maximum, HECToR will come in useful in other areas.
Boring areas. Poor HECToR will be put to use calculating the weather, climate change and ocean currents, thanks to its 63 million million calculations-per-second brain. HECToR will be a sad slave to science.
And in case you’re wondering, HECToR stands for High-End Computing Terascale Resource. They clearly thought up that name with the acronym in mind. It cost £113 million to make and install in the University of Edinburgh, so won’t be popping up on Ebuyer’s Deal of the Week mail out for quite a few years.
(Via Yahoo!)
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