What the earth's core and eggshells have in common

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The answer? HECToR’s Cray XT4. Last week Cray announced

Cray logo…that researchers in the United Kingdom (UK) are already achieving breakthrough science in a number of key disciplines using the powerful and highly scalable Cray XT4 supercomputer that was unveiled in January 2008 as part of the UK’s High-End Computing Terascale Resource (HECToR) project.

…These critical research projects include determining the composition of eggshell and how it’s manufactured, the ease of turbulence creation using fractal grids, how ultra-fast lasers cut through targets without damaging tissue and the temperature of the Earth’s core.

The press release also talks about other research into simulating turbulence and understanding how lasers cut through cancerous cells without damaging surrounding cells.

“The HECToR Cray XT4 system has been in service less than a year and yet has already enabled users to tackle larger scientific problems than ever before with some great new results,” said Ulla Thiel, vice president of Cray Europe. “And the value-added Cray Centre of Excellence at HECToR at the University of Edinburgh along with the Computational Science and Engineering support provided by the Numerical Algorithms Group has made available the performance and application support that the UK academic community needs to tackle new areas of science and drive toward true capability computing. We are very encouraged by these early results and expect great things from the HECToR Cray XT4 in the future.”