Tuesday July 31 7:28 AM ET
Supercomputer May Unlock Secrets of Universe
By Peter Griffiths
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain will unveil a state-of-the-art supercomputer on Tuesday which scientists hope will unlock the secrets of the origins of the universe.
The machine, the biggest supercomputer in British academia, cost $2 million and is one of the most powerful in Europe.
It will tackle what is arguably the biggest question on earth: How was the universe created?
The University of Durham in northeast England says its Cosmology Machine could store the contents of the British Library -- and still have spare memory.
``The new machine will allow us to recreate the entire evolution of the universe, from its hot Big Bang beginning to the present,'' said Professor Carlos Frenk of the university's physics department.
``It will confront one of the grandest challenges of science: the understanding of how our universe was created.''
Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt will unveil the computer later on Tuesday.
Despite huge advances in the last 40 years, cosmologists have a vast amount to learn about outer space.
Many now back the Big Bang theory which claims that 15 billion years ago, the universe, then the size of a tennis ball, began violently expanding.
But scientists are still arguing over the details.
A University of Durham spokesman said the computer, which can make 10 billion calculations a second, may help solve these mysteries.
``The Cosmology Machine takes data from billions of observations about the behavior of stars, gases, galaxies and the mysterious dark matter throughout the universe and then calculates how galaxies and solar systems formed and evolved,'' he said.
The supercomputer was made by Sun Microsystems (NasdaqNM:SUNW - news) and supplied by Esteem Systems and is run by the Institute for Computational Cosmology. It has a memory equivalent to 11,000 CD-ROMs.
Its launch comes after scientists in California said on Monday that they had found evidence of bacteria from outer space on the edge of the Earth's atmosphere.
The discovery appeared to support the controversial theory that life evolved in outer space and reached the Earth from comets. |
