17 Apr 08

The new facility is based at Begbroke Science Park.

On 15 April the Oxford Supercomputing Centre (OSC) opened a new £3M facility dedicated to providing University researchers with access to leading High Performance Computing systems.

At the heart of the centre are three brand new supercomputing systems which are being put to work on a vast range of problems including nanotechnology, climate change, drug discovery, social deprivation and galaxy formation. The three systems are housed in a new, dedicated data centre at Begbroke Science Park which was opened by Dr John Hood, the University's Vice Chancellor.

Centre manager Jon Lockley is enthusiastic about the centre's new equipment, explaining: 'Together the computational power of these machines is amazing - equal to each of the 6.6 billion people on the planet doing more than 1,500 calculations per second.'

OSC first formed in 1997 and has been through several generations of high end computer systems. However, the latest upgrade increases the computational power available to users by a factor of 15 with further expansions planned for the next two years.