The Flemish Supercomputer will be housed in a new data centre on the Sterre campus, the base of the university’s science faculty. It will be open to all Flemish universities and associated colleges, as well as to public research bodies. “In the future perhaps Flemish businesses could also be involved,” said project leader Tom Kuppens.

Supercomputers allow researchers to either solve problems in a very short time or to tackle massive calculations. Typical fields in which such calculations are common include weather research, biophysics, materials research, liquid and plasma dynamics and nanotechnology.

The new computer, which will cost €4.5 million, will be capable of 155 teraflops – equivalent to one thousand billion (1012) floating-point operations (or calculations) – every second. By comparison, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, the Fujitsu K in Kobe, Japan, is capable of more than 11 petaflops, or roughly 70 times more than the Flemish supercomputer.

At present, the five Flemish universities have, according to Kuppens, a total computing capacity of about 100 teraflops – but it is not all in one place. The new computer, he said, “will be capable of tackling much larger and complex scientific problems”.

Financing for the project comes jointly from the economy, science and innovation department of the Flemish government and from the Hercules Foundation, in charge of investment in research infrastructure.

The running costs of a supercomputer, however, are considerable. It consumes a great deal of electricity and produces heat, which requires cooling. According to some estimates made when the supercomputer was in the planning stages, the total consumption for running and cooling could reach 10,000 megawatt-hours a year, at an annual cost of nearly €1.5 million. Ah