The Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory (POL) is buying a high-performance computer cluster to help investigate how global warming will affect the UK shoreline.

Information generated by the system will be used by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in planning coastal erosion defence and flooding preparations.

Dr Roger Proctor, a coastal oceanographer at POL, says supercomputing is vital to the laboratory’s work.

‘We use numerical modelling for coastal ocean simulations,’ he said. ‘The cluster will be used to run long-term simulations to see how things such as climate change will have an impact on the shape of the coastline.’

The Liverpool-based laboratory wants the new system to have a minimum of 200 processors and a 10 terabyte storage facility.

Supercomputers are becoming increasingly important to scientists in many areas, says Quocirca analyst Clive Longbottom.

‘In the past they were expensive, but now you can get components for about £600 each, so you can define how much you want to spend and get the computer for that much,’ he said.

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