Hector, Europe’s fastest super computer
supercomputer that could help answer some of science’s biggest questions will be unveiled on Monday. With the power of 12,000 desktop PCs, the mammoth machine called HECToR is the fastest computer in Great Britain and one of the most powerful in Europe. It can make 63 million calculations each second, allowing scientists to conduct research into everything from climate change to new medicines. The purpose-built machine is housed in 60 wardrobe-sized cabinets in the University of Edinburgh’s advanced computing centre near the Scottish capital. After years of development, Chancellor Alistair Darling is due to attend the official launch ceremony for the 113 million pound machine.
“HECToR will enable us to do research that we simply could not do in any other way,” said Jane Nicholson, of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the public body which acts as the project’s managing agent. “We want to push forward the boundaries of knowledge.” Researchers will tap into its power to study ocean currents, build tiny parts for advanced computers and make warplanes less visible to radar. Other projects include research into superconductors, combustion engines and new materials. Scientists working in fields ranging from cosmology and atomic physics to disaster simulation and healthcare will also use the computer. HECToR, which stands for High-End Computing Terascale Resource, was made by the U.S. manufacturer Cray Inc. It must be just sweet to use the power of 12 thousand computers to encode movies…
Source: Reuters
Comments(111)
Can it run Crysis smoothly on 3048×2000+ resolution?
i have used Hector. he enjoyed it
“63 million calculations each second”
Surely that’s not correct?
wow can i run WC3 on this ?
Why can’t the world use all their time and effort to further humanity instead of war/conflict?
does it come with the new 9 series geforce card?
#3, I agree that must be a typo, because it’s a hilariously low number.
Sadly it is still running xp so it is not capable of running crysis in its full glory.
upgrading to vista and dx10 should give it the performance boost it so badly needs.
@8
The reason it was built so it would be the only system that will run Vista properly and so Microsoft can work out how to crash 12,000 PC’s at one time.
63 million calculations, is that like 63 Megahertz? lol
Hector (High End Computing Terascale Resources) is capable of 63 million million calculations a second and is four times faster than its predecessor.
wetback supercomputer? nice.
lol
i couldn’t help it.
I want one
Ok so its like 63 million Mhz or 63000 Ghz of 63 TeraHertz.
Cool
113 millions pounds is much better used in 3rd world social welfare
Cluster of 12000 graphic cards… :drools:
Forget quad sli or +fire LoL
^^Yes lets give all our money to help the 3rd world and stop worrying about our own advancement. If truth be told we would do ourselves a huge favour if we just forgot about them. Imagine how many HECToR’s we could have then…
meh, fastest comp is still around ~500 teraflops/sec iirc
How narrow minded can u get. Put yourself in their shoes so you won’t think indifferently.
£113 million!? So a footballer could probably buy on in about 2 weeks time?
“It must be just sweet to use the power of 12 thousand computers to encode movies…”
-User: Encode movies please?
-Hector: RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARR!!!!!1
(1 second later)
*world’s movie database encoding complete*
“Yes lets give all our money to help the 3rd world and stop worrying about our own advancement. If truth be told we would do ourselves a huge favour if we just forgot about them. ”
Do you realize that we only enjoy a high quality of life due to exploiting cheap labour, primary production etc in the 3rd world? If we forgot about them you can forget about ever being able to afford anything ever again.
They have shoes?
And it has nothing to do with narrow mindedness. You ver been to one of these countries? Doubt it
Is this better than Halo3?
with your comment you’ve proven yourself to be an idiot
vista is incompatible with hector (Hector gets blue screen of death)
supercomputers dont have any video cards, you are so dumß
supercomputers have procs, rams, hard disk and couple of thousand of km lines of everything… there is no such a video, avdio, lan cards… learn something easier 4 u
No deal – No one can run crysis max res full anti/alis.
wow eTheBlack we are all now so better learned from your enlightened comment and your “ß”, i am in your debt i thought it ran on atari power driven with mice on little spinning generators…. You tool!!
“the mammoth machine called HECToR is the country’s fastest computer and one of the most powerful in Europe”
Wich country? I presume Scotland.
i bet it won’t run age of empires II on 800×600.
@Martin
Why oh why can’t you link the original source?
anyways here it is
http://uk.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUKL1154155020080114
And as usual, faults in rlslogs article. This time in the headline!
From the original
“With the power of 12,000 desktop PCs, the mammoth machine called HECToR is the country’s fastest computer and one of the most powerful in Europe.”
notice the “and one of the most powerful in Europe” which is a big difference from “Europe’s fastest super computer”.
And clearly the “63 millions calculations per second is wrong but so says the source article so can’t blame you for that. Searched around a little and did some calculations
(source:http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?col=§ion=todaysfeatures&xfile=data/todaysfeatures/2008/January/todaysfeatures_January2.xml)
“HECToR’s computing power is astonishing. Its calculation speed is equivalent to every person on the planet performing 10,000 calculations every second – in computing terms that is the same as 12,000 standard desktop computers operating at full tilt.”
~6.6 billion people on the planet times 10000 = 6 600 000 000 000 which equals 66 TFlops. That number although a bit low sounds right. But it’s by no means the fastet in Europe. The fastet supercomputer in Europe is the 102,8 teraflops monster and belonges to the Swedish military-intelligence.
http://www.top500.org/list/2007/11/100
Fifth faster in the world.
The swedish one.
I love it when you liberal pussies get all worked up. Get up off your chair go to the airport and purchase yourself a ticket to one of these countries. I put money on you getting back with a much different attitude.
Call me cynical, but 12,000 desktops runs to… £12million tops. So wouldn’t it have been better to network up *112,000* desktops and blow those specs out the water?
wonder if they will let frank spencer anywhere near it..
This is what the BBC News article says about the speed:
The new supercomputer could run at speeds of up to 100 teraflops and will be able to carry out up to 100 trillion calculations every second, 100,000 times faster than an ordinary computer.
I’d say it’s fast
@Mike: Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that with “standard” networking.
I’m no expert, but I do know that with each networked machine, you lose some speed, so no it’s not better.
Maybe there are experts here that can elaborate on this?
I’m feeling so horny I wanna shag Chancellor Alistair Darling’s (what a name!) a5s in that room while he screams like: “Oooh, Hect0r, you’re so big – Sooo huge!”!
Even the spanish MareNostrum is better.. and was built in 2006.
How big is the hard drive?? Looks cool.
I live in Argentina 3r world country,you don need to give money or anything.The basic reason it´s that dictatorial goverments take debt with international banks ,it´s like if a burglar enter in your house and take loans with your identiti,now why international banks loans money to dictarorial goverments.Thats the best way to empty a country out of things.
For example here EEUU and Euro enterpises extract oil but there it´s no control at all just they word that they extracted certain amount of oil it´s just stupid all with the protection from the local corrupt goverment the president Nestor Kirtchner.
So most of the poverty of the people comes from corrput goverments and unscrupulous EEUU and Euro enterprises.
@DJBite
Ok that sounds better, would be stretching it calling it one of the fastest computers in Europe with “only” 66 Tflops. It still isn’t the fastet though.
@33
Hate to interrupt u buddy cause I agree, but look at number 2 in the Top500 list.
Germany is not in Europe right?
already running my topsite off Hector
@9
^^ i fully agree
bill is out to set a new record for most crashed PCs at the same time ^^
its not a normal network
a normal network does not utilise the processing power of all the computers.
they have to run in paralel, like dual core, quad core.
so there is a program that hooks up all the cpus to run in tandem.
heres a list of top supercomps compiled nov 07 dont know where this one comes in on the list
http://www.top500.org/lists/2007/11
just released:
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street CAM VCD-PreVail
enjoy!!
so after reading this story other places all i can say is you really murdered this article, martin.
@45
Didn’t see that one, although it doesn’t matter the point was that “Hector” is by no means the fastest in Europe.
does hector come in a shuttle option running linux??
bet it bogs down on 1080p games
I’m sure you you could play Crysis with uber max settings…
Crysis 2, on the other hand, which is already in production, would probably cause it to crash..hahaha…ha!
This computer can break any internet 1024K security key in a decent time. hurray the goverment has the upper hand.
Finally someone who understands lol good man
Wow, it has the power of 120 graphics cards (each costing 200 dollars each). Who could ever accuse the genocidal government of Blair and Brown of not getting value for money.
Today 120 ordinary people can cluster their game machines across the net, and running the right software, rival the processing power of this collosal waste of money. If these people are running quad SLI or crossfire (using the soon to release double chip cards), then only 30 systems are required. Given that it is possible to get motherboards with 4 pci-express slots, then in theory, 1 single PC could provide 1/15th the power of this 113million quid white elephant.
Some of you may claim the comparison unfair, but for many types of calculation, you would be plain wrong. However, even when the architecture of the supercomputer gives it a clear advantage, it in no way justifies having to pay 1000+ times more per teraflop than the ordinary PC solution.
One thing to remember- the supercomputers used to read all unencrypted internet traffic at GCHQ and NSA facilities operate at speeds beyond the imagination of most of you, although those computers are far from general purpose, and focus more on text processing and packet reconstruction than they do on floating point maths. Every ordinary phone ‘text’, Instant message or Email you send is read by the governments of the UK, USA and many other nations. Only good encryption that you control and implement prevents this from happening.
Projects like Google were specifically funded with NSA seed-money to research the infrastructure required to hold the results of such massive data mining efforts. Google’s hardware model is replicated by the NSA to allow the results of full traffic internet data mining to be stored and searched as required.
There is nothing amazing in the supercomputers you are allowed to know about, because these days people can truly do the same with their PC’s across the net. The computers built for the various security agencies are something else. For instance, when the US put out their propaganda lies about Iranian naval vessels threatening their warships, the story was carried across the global mass media. Any discussion ordinary people had on the subject using text messages on the internet or mobile phone network were analysed in real time to identify the effectiveness of the propaganda.
@47
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street CAM VCD-PreVail JUST RELEASED?????
Try released over 3 weeks ago re-tard
i have a bunch of computers sitting around, how to i hook them up to work in tandem?
@57
To be honest, the NSA and GCHQ do not have any “supercomputers”. In fact, we don not even have dual core yet. We still run windows XP and the biggest and most successful propaganda we ever put out was the fact that we are spying on your every message. Damn, I wish we could. That would be cool.
@Staff: Could you please change the title of the story? It’s totally misleading.
So noone here is smart enough to hook up computers to work in tandem?
btw the title says “Europe’s fastest” … there’s a faster one???
#5 Damn right.
oh, yes, the title is misleading.
and yes, they have such monstrous machines. remember? the net as we know it is spawned AFTER the military got the better part of after the cold war. don’t be fooled they would have let it creep onto us if there wasn’t already a better version on it. A friend of mine was serving military duty in a small eastern Europe capital – Sofia, Bulgaria and told they are using just such kind of “sniffing” boxes, but only cheaper – cisco
and the networking part- yes, it gets pretty damned hard to harness such a monstrous parallel comp power, because the very algorithms got to be damn good and that is the hard part. imagine those, running the stock exchange statistical predictions for ya? hell, imagine them running the GLOBAL civilization predictions….
“it’s easy if you try, you may say i am a dreamer, but i’m not the only one…”
mmmmmmm….lemme see….now someone can figure ot how to corrut 3rd world countries and drain them of alll resources at a much faster rate……..
Hector….quick….Pres Bush on the line..
IS IT WORTH IT TO ATTACK IRAN…
HECTOR: ” Irans only has enough oil reserves for 2 more years”
Pres Bush: ” Damn Damn Damn!!!!!….call back the troops!!!!”
http://www.hector.ac.uk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HECToR
“The second phase is planned for October, 2009, with a peak performance around 250 TeraFLOPS, and a third phase is planned for 2011.”
17th in the world
5th in Europe
http://www.top500.org/list/2007/11/100
2035 is closer than we think
@69 – Foxx
In 2035 my watch will have more processor power than
Hector
No, i’m afraid you got it wrong. Hector is aint no super computer, he’s a folk singer from finland. hate to tell you.
Maybe the processor speed is all well & good, but based on the current record of this government, it won’t be long before the hard drives are lost….!
do a google search @a@
there is a program that will allow you to hook up computers you have to run memtest
usually the machines all have to be the same spec and memory compatible
but for a few comps u may get away with different specs
dont give rslog ur email
they will only sell it on
after all we have those pain in the ass ads where the pages flip
its about time someone besides the military/spy agencies got their hands on this technology
NOT Europe’s fastest computer.
i want the computer as a birthday gift to play rainbow six las vegas 2.
i just downloaded a rar file but password is wrong,wish i had that hector for a week ,then he could find that password whch has 9 digit password about in less than a week
bad case of irobot but this 1’s named hector
@77:
9 digits thats (26+10)^9 or 260 billion combinations. (alphanumeric)
whit 63000 billion calculations per second, you would have it within a second…
OMG
eitanois thats going a bit too far isn’t it but yes since an all in one device is what the whole world craves for we might have something like watch wokrs like a mobile/mp3 player etc but hell why would it need that much procesor power?
cheers keep the dream on every1
ya 63 million sounds absurdly low, considering the CellBE can do 2 trillion calculations per second alone. Imagine if they took down all the Warhawk servers and used it as a supercomputer grid? 75 CellBE’s doing 2 Trillion calculations per second.0.o o.0
@80 – indianpunk
For Holography interface of course.
=D
Funny that nobody else sees 3 peculiar letters on the right cabinet. CRAY or is it IBM…
Also, it seems those fools never heard of the World Community Grid -> http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org
Grid Computing: The Basics
Grid computing joins together many individual computers, creating a large system with massive computational power that far surpasses the power of a handful of supercomputers. Because the work is split into small pieces that can be processed simultaneously, research time is reduced from years to months. The technology is also more cost-effective, enabling better use of critical funds.
Oops..hurray, they’ve just wasted 113 million pound worth of taxes!
Weep and CR(a)Y!
DUMB and DUMBER
Well this topic really sure is hot and some comments really got off the topic but its ok, its a free world after all. I really do agree with #5 and #23, wish this world would be a better place to live by tomorrow or the other day or the next week and so on… lets says soon. LOL.
“113 millions pounds is much better used in 3rd world social welfare”
I think that burning the money would be better than giving it to African money traps. This will at least be of use to the people that earnt/deserve it, not infection-riddled monkeys.
from http://www.hector.ac.uk/
Currently 60 Tflops, speed boost in 2009 to 250 Tflops, another planned phase after that will boost it even higher!
Is good that the UK finally has a decent (well come 2009) supercomputer!
keep your nationalism, keep your racism. you are fooled by your own indoctrination.
this is probaly not worth £113m they just say that and the rest of the money goes…
But it still cannot beat Halo3 : /
Haha, what a rip off – 113m pounds for 250TF is surely a joke – a single quad core Xeon cpu does 81Gflops, so for 1TF you need 12 Xeon CPUs. Said differently, they paid about 43000 pounds per cpu.
@73
they reckon in 2035 computers will come to think for themselves….
can anyone say Judgement Day…lol
at the present rate in 2035 computer upgrades will be instantanious…wow…hector will be obsolute in one day
“Now, if brainpower in the computer is doubling every 12 months and Google is gathering every single minute of every day the intentions of all the humans in the planet, imagine where that might lead in 10 years. And if we accept that Moore’s law (that the number of transistors on a chip should double every 18 months to two years) will continue, somewhere between the years 2020 to 2035, artificial intelligence will equal human intelligence and by definition, it will then double it.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore’s_law
let’s hope this British machine comes out slightly better than the original hector, RIP.
@91 – Foxx
Sorry, but it is Moore law only apply to hardware.
In 2035 we will have a full 3D interface, just imagine the
events to handle, no time no create a AI, just crappy programs
with lots of patches like Windows.
LoL some of yall need tin foil hats i say…lol google – nsa colaboraiting to toake over the universe roflmao… too many bourne fils for you sunshine
Oh and one more thing @ dgd..you are so full of crap…if it was that simple they would just do what u have suggested…people are not going to spend millions of $$ to do a task a couple thousound nvidia graphics cards could do (as u have so blantently suggested they could)
excuse english not to good
http://www.top500.org/system/8819
Then Swedens “Försvarets Radio Anstalt” ~ Defense Radio Agency is a bit more funny. Reading internettraffic from and to Sweden holding nr 5.. THATS a waste..
WE MUST DESTROY HECTOR
i want his ass
NSA (nr 15) and the Echelon project also doesn’t exist. All those damned lies spread on the internet
. Now I’m going to kill myself because of all the ignorent people on the planet and because the CIA, NCMorons and the idiots at the NSA don’t use Dual Cores, Quad Cores, triple 9800’s and 4×150GB Raptors, paired with 2×2GB PC8800 Mushkin, in a lovely Antec P1 case. We mustn’t forget some liquid nitrogen and we’re all set to go spying on people.
Proof that what I said is all true and to support your statement:
http://www.ncoic.com/echelon.htm
http://jya.com/echelon-dc.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
Oh Noes, the European Unionz knowz it!!
dgd Thank you for your constructive post, unlike the poster after you.
P.S. NSA thank you for making yourself look like the idiot that you are by posting the nonsense that you did.
“I think that burning the money would be better than giving it to African money traps. This will at least be of use to the people that earnt/deserve it, not infection-riddled monkeys.”
Thank You! Faild States and Failed Economies is the problem with the 3rd World. I’ve went to college with Civil Engineers, (who have gone to Africa to build public works) that tell me they had built a structure multiple times, because the people there would burn them down! These people don’t want to be helped!
What needs to established is the Political Will!
@3
it’s just the first phase, in the second phase the “computer” will have a capacity of 250 TeraFLOPS
@9
can you imagine it running with Windows ???
HeCtoR is running some kind of Unix operation system (Unicos)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HECToR
While not being a “single” computer, it is amazing that Folding at Home (distributed computing) reached 1 PetaFlop (1000 TeraFlops) a few months ago (with the help of PS3’s no less).
is not so dificult to spend lots of $$ to build supercomputer, it’s much biger problem to create software for that hardware…
all that hardware but what exploits that power?
imagine that you have best desktop PC but nothing on hdd, no OS…so, what all that hardver is…junk in box(figurative)?
“supercomputer that could help answer some of science’s biggest questions will….”
I already know the answer…its 42.
the pic in the article is of bluegene not hector. and usually for machines like this you are paying for the scalable networks for parallel processing. and in the case of the cray machines, most likely memory bandwidth which they currently seem to excel at.
its most likely running linux of some sort, unicos isnt really what customers want these days
“Software is decelerating faster than hardware is accelerating.” Gates’ Law
(law’s name refers to Bill Gates)
wikipedia
Fastest general purpose computer used for several unique and interesting projects:
Average floating point operations per second 827,547.0 GigaFLOPS / 827.547 TeraFLOPS
http://boincstats.com/stats/project_graph.php?pr=bo
And it’s still growing!