Supercomputer for Adelaide institution

Life for researchers at the University of Adelaide has just got a little bit easier, thanks to the acquisition of a $1.7 million supercomputer.

The supercomputer, which is called Hydra, performs at an operating speed more than 250 times faster than a high-end desktop computer, and is one of the fastest of its kind in the world. It is capable of performing a mind boggling one trillion arithmetic operations per second.

Hydra is owned by the South Australian partnership for Advanced Computing (SAPAC), which is a consortium of the universities of Adelaide, Flinders and South Australia.

"Hydra is a major addition to South Australia’s supercomputing capability, and gives researchers the high-performance computing power they need to keep pace within their fields and remain internationally competitive," says the Director of SAPAC, Associate Professor Tony Williams.

"It will play a vital role in fields as diverse as biotechnology, water resource management, defence, petroleum geology, mining exploration, physics, chemistry and engineering.

"Hydra’s speed and versatility will also make it attractive to new research initiatives, powering innovation in South Australia and helping to drive the State’s knowledge economy."

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