At peak performance the multi-million pound high performance computers (HPCs) will carry out over 13 trillion calculations per second. That is equivalent to the entire population of the world working simultaneously on hand-held calculators for about three hours.

"This initiative puts Bristol at the forefront of high performance computing", said Professor David May, Head of Computer Science. "The HPC impact will be enormous right across all disciplines turning data into knowledge. It will influence both research and teaching. Universities that understand this will be the most competitive in the 21st century".

The University today announced the award of the contract to install the computers to a consortium led by ClusterVision, working with IBM and ClearSpeed Technology. The largest of the three HPCs will be one of the fastest University research computers in the UK, and is expected to be one of the top 100 computers of its type in the world.

Dr David Newbold, physicist, explained how the new HPC cluster will allow the University's physicists to be amongst the first to examine results from the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle collider which is set to provide new insights into the structure of space and time and the origin of mass.

Professor Paul Valdes, climatologist, said: "This is an incredibly exciting development. These HPCs will allow us to develop a new generation of numerical models that have a much more sophisticated representation of the climate system. This will give everyone much greater confidence in the regional predictions of future climate change."

Professor Steve Wiggins, Head of Mathematics and a co-instigator of the project, stated that "HPC ha
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Contact: Cherry Lewis
cherry.lewis@bristol.ac.uk
44-772-942-1885
University of Bristol
6-Jun-2006