The University of Edinburgh’s soon-to-be-built supercomputer will cover the size of two tennis courts, but the machine is actually space-efficient: It will equal the computing power of about 14,000 desktop PC’s.
The massive device — which will be installed in October, according to BBC News — will let scientists across Scotland and the rest of Britain run climate-change simulations, test new drugs, and model the formation of the universe. But even state-of-the-art supercomputers now have short life spans: Edinburgh officials say Hector, as the machine is called, will only last them until 2014. —Brock Read
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