Britain's new fastest supercomputer makes its ominous debut

It's always tough to keep track of the fastest supercomputers around at any given moment, but according to Reuters, the rather imposing block of machines pictured above is now at the top of the heap in Britain, and at least near the top in all of Europe. Dubbed HECToR (for High-End Computing Terascale Resource), the Cray-built rig packs the equivalent power of 12,000 desktop PCs, or enough to perform some 63 million calculations per second, which'll apparently be used to study everything from climate change to new medicines -- or, as the researchers responsible for the computer put it, "push forward the boundaries of knowledge." In related news, Engadget's Folding@home team is still accepting new members -- nudge nudge, British friends.

[Thanks, Matt]

[jeremy @ Jan 14th 2008 2:30PM]

Any hackers feel like helping get some of my transcoding jobs on that beast.

[Wesburl @ Jan 14th 2008 3:01PM]

LoL at 63 million...... I think you meant Trillion with at tah tah tah Tee : )

[jeremy @ Jan 14th 2008 2:31PM]

Any hackers feel like helping get some of my transcoding jobs on that beast.

[soniiic @ Jan 14th 2008 2:31PM]

63,000,000 calculations per second divided by 12,000 desktop PCs = 5250

Ummm, i'm sure all desktop PCs do more than 5250 calculations per second :/

[Mike @ Jan 14th 2008 2:49PM]

That number seemed a bit low to me too

[soniiic @ Jan 14th 2008 2:41PM]

just googled and came up with this:

"It is now possible to buy a system capable of 15 Giga Floating Point Operations Per Second (GFLOPS) for about $750."

source: http://www.linux-mag.com/microsites.php?site=business-class-hpc&sid=main&p=4088

a GFLOP is a billion FLOPS, yet i don't know if this directly means 15billion calculations, or much less due to it being an 'operation' but from my knowledge, it can't be only 63 million calculations...

[soniiic @ Jan 14th 2008 2:46PM]

63 trillion yay!

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gallery/2008/jan/03/supercomputers?picture=331931869

[Kurtis @ Jan 14th 2008 2:51PM]

wow Engadget, way to be off by a factor of a million...

[Sam Winter @ Jan 14th 2008 6:45PM]

@kurtis
LOL.. no kidding.

@engadget
Silly rabbit, megaflops are for kids. That Trillions of floating point operations per second (TeraFlops)

[JLTate @ Jan 14th 2008 2:37PM]

IBM Roadrunner FTW!

[streetname @ Jan 14th 2008 2:38PM]

63 trillion per second sounds closer.

[Jason @ Jan 14th 2008 2:39PM]

Is that "63 million calculations" (63 MegaFLOPS) per second a typo? IBMs BlueGene can do over a petaFLOP (ONE THOUSAND TRILLION) per second.

[Kevin @ Jan 14th 2008 2:39PM]

but can it play doom?

[Adoniteking @ Jan 14th 2008 3:58PM]

doom will be DOOMED! as sonn as you insert the disc!

[atlasfugged @ Jan 15th 2008 12:56AM]

it beats the game in a picosecond.

[Student Driver @ Jan 14th 2008 2:46PM]

But is it Blu-Ray or HD-DVD? With that much power, it *should* support BD Live, right?

[Samurai Jack @ Jan 14th 2008 2:49PM]

They might call it Hector. I call it Colossus.

Be afraid, Britain. Be very afraid.

[Mike smith @ Jan 14th 2008 2:51PM]

oh so you wana be friends with the british when it comes to ur campaigns but when its time for one of ur competition we arent good enough to be able to take part in that, and you say about ur lawyer saying u can't but you have in the past (rarely)

[Blake Bowen @ Jan 14th 2008 3:13PM]

What the hell does this even mean?

[Raheem @ Jan 14th 2008 3:14PM]

Haha very nicely put!

[nh @ Jan 15th 2008 7:25AM]

I think what he is trying to say is:

"Oh gosh, this makes me so cross I can hardly type!

"You are very quick to befriend the British public when it comes rallying support to your Folding@home campaign, but the thinly disguised hull of a friendship all but disappears during comeptition time; A relationship works both ways you know!

"And don't you give us any of that nonsense about your lawyers not allowing foreign entrants! In times gone by you've held international competitions without making a song and dance about it, so we know you are lying, you scallywags!"

Or similar.

[Mike smith @ Jan 14th 2008 7:17PM]

exactly what I was trying to say! i will hire you next time i want to put a point across

[Sam Winter @ Jan 14th 2008 6:48PM]

@nh

Haha. You made my day...

[Michael LaFramboise @ Jan 14th 2008 2:59PM]

Well I guess they do need all that processing power to monitor all those cameras :)

[John @ Jan 14th 2008 3:16PM]

Gosh, if that's the fastest computer in Britain and is as fast as 12,000 of their desktops, it seems that your average resident cannot, in fact, play Doom.

[jamesf @ Jan 14th 2008 3:17PM]

yet it still struggles w/ Crysis

[Adoniteking @ Jan 14th 2008 3:55PM]

crysis will be in CRYSIS if it is played on the computer.

[kbiel @ Jan 14th 2008 3:19PM]

I'm sure they meant to name it Hactar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_characters_from_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Hactar

[William @ Jan 14th 2008 3:50PM]

The Only thing that wuold make that picture better would be a woman running down that corridor with a sledge hammer ready to free the Masses

[bozzball @ Jan 14th 2008 3:56PM]

I don't care how fast it is. If it doesn't run Windows, it's no good.

[matt @ Jan 14th 2008 4:46PM]

I'm not sure if you are taking the piss or not? Don't you think windows is a bit of a noddy operating system, I have doubts wether it has the admin capabilities to deal with this.

On the upside it might just run Vista at a speedy rate....

[aguiluz @ Jan 14th 2008 3:59PM]

Let's see if we pit it against Folding@Home.

[Sam_Smith @ Jan 14th 2008 4:31PM]

This thing doesn't hold a candle to my Core 2 Quad Q6600!

[Frankenstein Black @ Jan 14th 2008 4:50PM]

Too much folding@home damaged my day one 60GB PS3! Altaïr never looked so bad ;^(...
http://www.eternal-champions.com/images/ac_ps3_09.jpg
And this is the tame game shot. More pics for other games available...

[ohrick @ Jan 14th 2008 4:59PM]

"Want to play a game?"

[JuggleNuts @ Jan 14th 2008 5:16PM]

"push forward the boundaries of knowledge."

AKA "monitor Britain's 100,000 CCTVs."

[michas_pi @ Jan 14th 2008 5:29PM]

I think you are also off by a factor of a million.

[LagmastaC @ Jan 14th 2008 5:30PM]

I think I know what we're all thinking..... Can it play Crysis on very high?

[Kal-El @ Jan 14th 2008 9:35PM]

Ah finally, a computer that can play Crysis at Very High.

[Mau @ Jan 14th 2008 11:33PM]

Yes, but will it blend?

[Tadju @ Jan 15th 2008 6:33AM]

"The £113m publicly funded project"
"(calculation speed) the same as 12,000 standard desktop computers"

£113m / 12,000 = £9420 per "standard desktop computer"

While I understand that contructing a supercomputer is rather different to linking up 12,000 machines, you could buy at least 10x the power of this by buying standard desktops? Someone sold this project well!

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/02/computing.climatechange

[seoultrain @ Jan 15th 2008 6:52PM]

No matter. This'll get destroyed by Achilles.

HECToR!!

[Cap2501 @ Jan 17th 2008 5:42PM]

Ya it is off by an order of magnitude or two.

From top500's november list #17: http://www.top500.org/list/2007/11/100
while at that point it could only perform 54 tflops of the theoretical max of 64 tflops.

Either they recently rectified that or this is old news.

[Cap2501 @ Jan 17th 2008 5:44PM]

Oh and of course it is still getting spanked silly by bluegene/L.