It can single handedly do what a few thousand desktop computers together can-process over 137 million messages a second.
And what's best, it is highly eco-friendly even though it has a massive 100 gigabytes per-second bandwidth which will help scientists test jet engines, design new drugs to fight cancer and examine the fundamental nature of the nucleus of the atom.
Meet Wilkes - the super energy-efficient high-performance computer, with a capacity equivalent to 4,000 desktop machines running at once.
One of the world's greenest supercomputers has just been unveiled by the High Performance Computing Service at the
University of Cambridge.
Named "Wilkes", after the Cambridge pioneer Maurice Wilkes, who built one of the first ever programmable computers in 1949, the new system with a design to support the world's largest telescope has been rated second in the "Green 500" - a ranking of the most efficient supercomputers worldwide.
It is, however, the most efficient air-cooled
supercomputer in the world today (the first-placed machine used an oil-cooled system instead), making it the greenest machine of its kind. Designed and built by the in-house engineering team within the Cambridge High Performance Computing Service, Wilkes' energy efficiency is 3,361 Mega-flops per watt.
"Flops" (floating point operations per second) are a standard measure of computing performance.
Dr Paul Calleja, director of the Cambridge High Performance Computing Service said "Energy-efficiency is the biggest single challenge in supercomputing today and our new system makes an important step forward in this regard."
One of the primary uses of Wilkes is as a test bed for the development of a computing platform for the
Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
This is a huge, international effort to build the world's largest telescope.
By detecting radio waves with unprecedented sensitivity and fidelity, the facility has the potential to answer some essential questions about the Universe, such as what the nature of dark energy is, and perhaps the most fundamental question of all - are we alone?
Cambridge is leading the design of the computational platform within the SKA, which is by far the world's most ambitious IT project. Wilkes will play an integral role in this design process.
Maurice Wilkes was the man behind
EDSAC, the first programmable computer to come into general use. Built in 1946, it put Cambridge at the forefront of the digital revolution. More than six decades later, this latest supercomputer, bearing Wilkes' name, is destined to write the next chapter in that ongoing story.
