Britain has launched its biggest academic supercomputer, nicknamed the Cosmology Machine, based at the University of Durham Physics Department. The million dollar (U.S.) installation is capable of performing 10 billion arithmetic operations per second and has a total of 112 Gbytes of RAM and 7 Terabytes of data storage.

The Cosmology Machine gathers information about the behavior of stars, gases, and enigmatic dark matter throughout the universe and then calculates, at ultra high speeds, how galaxies and solar systems evolved. Through simulating a virtual universe and by testing different theories of cosmic evolution, it can test which ideas come closest to explaining origin and future of the universe as scientists currently understand it.

The new supercomputer was manufactured by Sun and funded by the Joint Research Equipment Initiative (JREI). The JREI was set up by the DTI's Office of Science and Technology, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce), and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) to provide strategic investment in key scientific infrastructure for research of international quality.

Long-term goals of the research are to understand the formation of structures in the universe, to establish the identity and properties of the dark matter that dominates the dynamics of the universe, to determine the boundaries of the current world model, and to relate the Big Bang theory to astronomical observations. It is also hoped that the supercomputer's capabilities will set new standards that could also help other areas of research. Its engine room is an integrated cluster of 128 UltraSPARCTM III processors and a 24-processor Sun FireTM Server.

Chief Executive of PPARC, Professor Ian Halliday says, "This is a stunning resource for astronomical research in Britain. It will enable consortium scientists in UK, Germany, Canada and the USA to perform cosmological calculations of unprecedented size and detail. We are poised to confront one of the grandest challenges of science: the understanding of how our universe was created and how it evolved to its present state."

http://www.sun.com/edu [...read more...]

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