LONDON: Scientists have just switched on the most powerful academic computer outside the United States. The HPCx at Daresbury laboratory in Warrington, Cheshire — the main lab of the government-funded research council — has enough electronic brainpower to complete a full year’s maths homework and classwork for every child in Britain in one fifth of a second.

When in full service, the $84 million network of 1,280 powerful processors running in parallel will be able to undertake the hitherto undreamed of: model the air turbulence behind a jet as it lands, or the machinery of a cell as it manages the business of life.

The Daresbury installation ranks ninth in the world’s top 500 supercomputer league table, and can handle 3.5 trillion number-crunching operations a second. According to Paul Durham, of Daresbury, it could one day accelerate medical research and cut costs at airports.

Precise satellite navigation and computer control could speed up traffic at airports and save on new runways. The wild card is the mysterious phenomenon of air turbulence.

Air traffic controllers allow time between takeoffs and landings because each jet plane leaves in its wake a tumble of vortices in the air. “They have to die down before the next one comes along, otherwise all hell breaks loose,” says Prof Durham. “Now if you could really do a model that shows what happens when a wake vortex hits the ground and bounces back up, you would be able to understand that, and try to design it out.”

The computer will also be used to model once-unimaginable biological processes. Smaller computers can model individual enzymes, proteins and very complex things at the molecular level. But the next stage — to model all the parts of a cell working together, the traffic of elements through cell membranes, and the behaviour of the tiny organs within the cells- requires awesome processing power. The challenge is to mimic life in the act of sustaining itself.

“Some people talk of trying to make a virtual human,” Prof Durham said. “I think that is senseless. But could you make a virtual liver, and watch it processing alcohol? Yes. I am not saying we are going to do that tomorrow, but that is what we are going to build up to.”

In theory, a silicon laboratory could eliminate at least so some animal experiments. “That would be a goal,” Prof Durham said. “There is an awful lot to understand before we are at that stage, an awful lot. But yes, that is a goal.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.