Inside the life-saving £60m supercomputer

SYSTEMS manager Luis Popovics edges down a narrow corridor in what looks like little more than a typical gym locker-room.

However, behind the nondescript, burgundy panels sits a £60 million technological innovation that could help answer some of the biggest questions in science.

Meet Hector, the most advanced supercomputer in the United Kingdom and a machine that can perform no fewer than 63 trillion calculations every second.

Based at Edinburgh University's Advanced Computing Facility, Hector, which stands for High-End Computing Terascale Resources, will be used by researchers at the cutting edge of their fields.

Its rather plain appearance belies an artificial intelligence that could be instrumental in tackling climate change, developing new drugs and producing the next generation of passenger aircraft.

Hector is located just outside the Scottish capital, but scientists based anywhere will have virtual access to the phenomenal resource if they are granted permission through an application process based on excellence.

And the machine can be in multiple use at any one time, so ground-breaking research in various fields can be carried out simultaneously.

For example, the National Centre for Atmospheric Science will use it to produce more detailed environmental models of the planet.

The hope is that by creating high- resolution models, environmental processes that currently remain unseen can be studied. This might then be used for climate-change forecasting.

Researchers at Oxford University will use the supercomputer to calculate the way electrical impulses travel around the heart. They could then use this information to work out how best to correct the electrical activity when it goes awry.

Dr Joe Pitt-Francis, one of the project leaders, said: "For the past two years, we have been developing new programming codes that model the heart's electrical and mechanical activity.

"We are now ready to test these on the supercomputer and, if we can build a reliable and robust model, we can hopefully experiment with new ways to control this activity – which might eventually lead to better technology to treat arrhythmias, for example."

The equations that make up the model heart on Hector could be altered to give it an electric shock and view the outcome. A virtual pacemaker could also be implanted. Meanwhile, Bristol University hopes to use Hector to speed up the process of designing drugs, while University College London even wants to employ it to find new uses for clay.

Hector's ingenuity also extends to providing information about how best to manage commercially important fisheries.

Dr Emma Young, of the British Antarctic Survey, wants to use the supercomputer to work out how the larvae and eggs of fish get swept around the oceans to set up new populations or replenish existing colonies.

She has developed a computer model to simulate how currents are influenced by the atmosphere and other factors.

For the simulation, the sea is divided into a grid of about 4.5 million cells and, within each of these, key factors are predicted at five-second intervals for several "virtual months". The level of detail means it can be done only with an extremely large computing capacity.

Dr Young said: "Currents are affected by tides, wind, heat exchange between the air and sea, melting water from glaciers, and so on. We are able to simulate different oceanographic conditions to see which ones might be important for transporting material away from spawning grounds and the likelihood of eggs and larvae being retained."

Hector's capacity is difficult to grasp. It is capable of performing 63 trillion calculations – the equivalent of every person on earth each carrying out 10,000 each – per second.

To match its capacity, 12,000 desktop computers would have to operate at full tilt.

Hector was officially unveiled yesterday by Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, who joked: "I suspect Northern Rock is beyond it."

However, he went on to say that Britain had an illustrious past in science and he was keen for this to be promoted and encouraged. He said: "The facility here means things that might have taken years to develop can be brought forward much more quickly."

Edinburgh University has secured Hector by virtue of its Parallel Computing Centre, which has a formidable worldwide reputation. It submitted the successful bid at European level to manage the project, while American computing firm Cray secured the contract to provide the hardware.

The scheme came in ahead of time and below budget – although operating costs over its lifespan are likely to be higher than predicted because of rising energy costs.

Professor Arthur Trew, director of the computing centre, said: "Hector is the latest UK national facility for high- performance computing and it's therefore the most powerful computer in the UK, which is going to be used for computational research by groups of academics.

"Hector has a performance of around 50 to 60 million million calculations per second. It's necessary to have that speed because many of the problems it will investigate are very complex – from trying to study the earth's climate, to better aircraft, to new drugs. The current UK national facility is called HPCX and is run by Edinburgh. Hector is four times faster."

The supercomputer is in the top 20 machines worldwide – or in the top ten if the weapons industry is discounted.

Back in the tennis court-sized room, the man in the overalls – system manager Luis Popovics – completes his walk between the "gym lockers".

It becomes clear that the top of his tea trolley is stocked with pieces of advanced technology that can "talk" to each other.

The beauty of the supercomputer is that it allows for lots of parts of the computer to converse continuously, while making numerous calculations simultaneously.

Security measures are in place to protect the system from thieves who may steal to order.

In keeping with Hector's prosaic appearance, there are no retina or fingerprint scanning devices in place. Instead, there is a labyrinth of clanking security doors which operate on timelock.

However, although Hector may be at the cutting edge of technology today, its time as the toast of the scientific community is limited. It will be upgraded in 2009, and again in 2011. In six years, however – having run up a bill of about £113 million – it will be obsolete.

• NOISE POLLUTION

THE aim is to reduce the sound of jet engines. The noise comes from the way the air flows from the engine's nozzles. Computers can be used to create a model that breaks the air into cells, which can be studied to work out how the sound is produced. Once this is achieved, researchers can work out how to reduce the level of noise. The greater the power of the computer, the smaller the cells can be made. Engineers have been experimenting with nozzle shapes for decades and have found a serrated shape works – but no-one knows why.

• EMISSIONS

TO cut harmful emissions from jet aircraft and gas turbines in power stations, scientists need to know how the flame is behaving in the combustion technology. This cannot be done by experiments and a computer model of the flame needs to be created. The more powerful the computer, the smaller pieces the model can be broken down into. The computer can then calculate what is happening at each stage of the – very, very fast – combustion process. Scientists will pass the results on to the industry, which can create cleaner systems.

• SCANNERS



THE goal is to make these vital diagnostic tools more efficient. Superconductors – materials through which electricity flows without resistance – could be used to create better scanners. Current superconductors are ceramics, which are brittle and not easy to process. They also have complex atomic structures, which are difficult to break down.

To understand why they are superconductors, all the electrons must be looked at simultaneously, which is an extremely complex mathematical problem.

• CLIMATE CHANGE

HECTOR could be used to produce improved forecasts of the possible consequences of global warming, and a more detailed representation of the Earth than has previously been possible.

At present, scientific models break the Earth into grid boxes of about 300sq km for the atmosphere and 100sq km for the ocean. By shrinking these to 100sq km and 30sq km respectively, more detail could be shown, such as the impact of the mountains on the atmosphere, or small tidal patterns. This could better indicate how climate processes work.

• FISHERIES

SCIENTISTS want to establish how larvae and the eggs of fish get swept around the sea, to better manage commercially-important fisheries. Sea currents are affected by factors such as tide, wind and heat. These can be simulated by a computer model, which can be altered to create different conditions in the oceans. To do this, the sea must be broken down into millions of cells. The number of calculations required to do this needs a hugely powerful supercomputer.

• HEART DISEASE

MEDICAL researchers are keen to improve our understanding of how the heart works and to develop new treatments for heart disease. The new supercomputer could create a model that simulates how electrical impulses travel around the heart. The contraction of the heart muscle is governed by these impulses which, in turn, are dictated by physiological factors. These factors can be described as a series of highly-complicated equations. Experiments could be done on the model – for instance, fitting a virtual pacemaker or inflicting an electrical shock.