£3.2m supercomputer installed at Southampton

The Iridis4 packs 12,200 Intel Xeon E5-2670 processor cores, a petabyte of disc space and 50terabytes of memory. Powered by IBM's Intelligent Cluster Solutions, it is claimed to be four times more powerful than its predecessor, the Iridis3. Dr Oz Parchment, director of research computing at the university, said: "Southampton is a leader in high performance Ccomputing and Iridis4 allows us to take another leap forward to keep pace with the needs of our world class researchers. "There is an ever increasing demand for the use of supercomputing power for research and this new machine will provide the opportunity for even more academics to work on a greater number of projects, at faster speeds." Iridis4 will be used for research by university staff and students across a range of disciplines. Around 350 projects are expected to run on the machine in the first year.