HECToR is a new supercomputer assembled at University of Edinburgh, UK. This is one of the fastest machines in Europe which can do 60 million million calculations per second! The total cost of this machine is over $200 million and equivalent to over 10,000 desktop computers.

HECToR contains over 5000 AMD 2.8GHZ dual core Opteron processors the peak performance is 63Tflops. The total memory of HECToR is 33TB (6GB per processor)!! The storage used is high performance RAID disks with a total capacity of 576TB. HECToR uses Unicos/lc as the operating system and has two components - compute node linux for compute nodes and linux distro(SUSE Linux) for service nodes. The communication network uses 6 sets of Seastar2 chip based system and each link offers bi-directional bandwidth of 7.6GB/sec!

HECToR (High-End Computing Terascale Resource) is a project funded by research councils in UK and this facility is available to researchers in UK Universities. The main use of this supercomputer will be in simulation of complex natural phenomena such as climate change prediction.

HECToR is composed of 66 individual units as shown below and each of the unit is as big as a large shelf!

You can see the current status of HECToR supercomputer here!