Reading claims UK's most powerful academic computer

The University of Reading now boasts most powerful academic supercomputer in the country.

The IBM supercomputer IBM Blade Centre has been upgraded with 700 JS21 blades, equipped with 3,040 IBM PowerPC 970 cores clocking 2.3GHz.

The computer's theoretical peak performance is 27.97 teraflops, and 19.04 Tflops has been measured using the Linpack benchmark.

This puts it 36th in the workld ranking but it is outclassed by a supercomputer at the military Aldermaston nuclear complex.

The University of Reading says the new system places it not just at the forefront of the most accurate research into air pollution modeling, climate change, financial modeling, drug discovery, computational biology and meteorology but also computational science.

"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 systems engineering at the University's Advanced Computing and Emerging Technologies (ACET) Centre.

"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."

Professor Vassil Alexandrov, the university's leading expert on computational science and director of its ACET Centre, added: "The possibilities of use for this computer are endless. In addition to the advance of computational science, we will be at the cutting edge of giving more precise pollution predictions, speeding up the design of lifesaving drugs, investigating scenarios in climate change and thus making real changes to people's well being."