Bristol University is taking on three high performance computer systems for use in climate change and space-time research.

The systems will include 636 servers with 2,544 processing cores, with the biggest of the three machines being capable of 13 trillion calculations per second.

Professor David May, Bristol's head of computer science, says supercomputing capacity is becoming vital to the research being conducted at UK universities.

'I can't really see how you could manage without them. These machines have become powerful enough to build accurate models of many scientific and engineering systems,' he said.

'For instance, in medicine, if you can build computational models of the way the human body works then you can do experiments of computers, not on people.'

While the systems, supplied by IBM and ClearSpeed, will be used heavily for climate modelling research into global warming, they will also be available to all the university's departments to carry out calculations.

In the past, supercomputing tended to be seen as a specialised activity, May says.

'Now it has uses across a lot of subjects, astronomy, chemistry, physics and even into the humanities because of the large data sets that are starting to come in there,' he said.

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