Question: Do you use a middle class computer for research or a high tech one?

Sam Connolly answered on 17 Jun 2014:

I have a really powerful desktop computer, which is good enough to do most of the stuff I do quickly. It has four processors and 16GB of RAM, if you know about computers. If I wanted to run a programme which had to do loads and loads of calculations it could take a bit too long on my one though, in which case I would use the IRIDIS supercomputer at Southampton University. IRIDIS is so powerful that lots of people use it at the same time and it’s still much faster than their own computers! It’s in the top ten fastest computers in the UK – it has 12,200 processors and 50,000 GB of RAM, so you can see why it’s much faster than mine! Especially considering the processors are faster than the ones in my computer – they can each do one trillion calculations per second (which is a million million). Than means the whole computer can do 12,200000000000000 calculations every second! That’s 12.2 quadrillion!