Work begins on UK’s new £750m supercomputer at Edinburgh University site

The team behind the supercomputer, and researchers who hope to use it, say they are very excited about the project.

As the name would suggest, a supercomputer is a very powerful machine. The numbers for this new one are mind-boggling.

Prof Mark Parsons, the director of the supercomputer project at the university, says it will be roughly the size of a medium-sized supermarket.

It has thousands of processers and will be able to make a billion – billion calculations per second. That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Prof Parsons said the computer would help researchers and commercial companies to “simulate the world around them”.

It will do that by taking huge amounts of data, and creating models of things that are not easy to do an experiment on in a laboratory.

He added: “Supercomputers model things that happen too quickly, like quantum; that are too large, like an earthquake; or too long – like the expansion of the universe.”