Reading claims UK's most powerful academic supercomputer

IBM blade system will be used for research into lifesaving drugs and climate change

The supercomputer is based on IBM blade systems

The University of Reading has upgraded its supercomputer to allow greater accuracy in research on areas which affect the lives of millions of people.

Possibilities of use for the supercomputer include giving more precise pollution predictions, speeding up the design of lifesaving drugs and investigating climate change.

The university’s Advanced Computing and Emerging Technologies (ACET) centre houses the IBM system, upgraded by high-performance computing integrator OCF, with 700 blade systems, equipped with 3,040 IBM PowerPC 970 processor cores each running at 2.3Ghz clock speed with a theoretical peak performance of 27.97 Teraflops (trillion operations per second).

The system is ranked number 36 in the June 2007 top 500 list of the biggest supercomputers in the world. Reading claims it is the most powerful academic supercomputer in the UK.

‘This powerful supercomputer will vastly improve the capability of the University of Reading scientists and others to model many aspects of our world, including such things as climate change, novel drugs and financial markets,’ said Chris Guy, head of the School of Systems Engineering at the university.

‘More accurate predictions in each of these areas, as a result of better modelling, will enable us to make real changes to people’s lives by, for example, showing where flood defences should be built or speeding up the development of life-saving drugs.’

The most powerful supercomputer in the UK is at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston.