Dell, a company best-known for budget PCs, is extending its low-cost ethos to high-end supercomputers. Yesterday, the group, more usually associated with building plain black boxes for office workers, unveiled a giant machine in London that will strive to uncover cures for cancer - and the origins of the universe.

The move comes amid burgeoning competition in “mass market” supercomputers. The sector is estimated to be worth more than $10 billion (£4.99 billion) by IDC, the analysts. Estimates put growth at about 20 per cent a year, as researchers harness levels of performance available at prices undreamt of a decade ago.

Dell’s Legion supercomputer, built for University College London (UCL), will be one of the most powerful in Europe. Funded by a £3.9 million government grant, it will weigh 21 tonnes and have the power of nearly 3,000 desktop PCs.

The agreement underpinning the system – designed to foster long-term cooperation between Dell and UCL – was signed yesterday by Michael Dell, the group’s billionaire chief executive.

Mr Dell said: “Low-cost supercomputing changes the game.” He predicted that machines such as Legion will transform existing “broad brush” treatments of diseases and replace them with bespoke medicines tailored to a patient’s DNA. UCL believes that Legion could presage a time when surgeons in theatre access massively powerful machines in real time.

The task of writing code that exploits the full capacity of Legion’s peak performance – an expected 42.9 teraflops (or trillion calculations per second) – is expected to have knock-on effects for computer-driven trading models used in the City.

Researchers in UCL’s physics and astronomy department, meanwhile, will perform “the most detailed simulations ever conducted of cold dark matter structure formation” in the universe. UCL said: “This will test our understanding of the origin of galaxies and of gravity itself.”

Supercomputing’s future lies in commoditisation, according to Mr Dell, who is famed for being ruthless on cost. He said: “The days of the monolithic giant machine are long over.”

Legion uses a “cluster” model that harnesses the power of 2,560 pro-cessor cores based on Intel’s dual-core technology – already found in laptop machines available on the high street.

Mr Dell said: “Using industry standards-based technology, rather than high-priced, proprietary systems, researchers have access to previously unavailable levels of computing power.”

Legion’s power already highlights the pace of advance. In 2000 the first supercomputer passed four teraflops a second, a figure that the UCL machine has improved on tenfold.

Meanwhile, the aggregate computing power of the current Top500 list – the annual league table of the world’s most powerful systems – is now 4.9 petaflops (1,000 trillion calculations per second), nearly double the 2.8 petaflops reported in 2006.

UCL plans to make Legion accessible to researchers across its faculties – even to the arts. David Price, the chairman of the UCL research computing subcommittee, said. “High-end supercomputing used to be the preserve of an elite few in the academic world, but not anymore.”

It all adds up

— The term “Super Computing” was first used in 1929 by the New York World

— The most powerful computer is IBM’s BlueGene/L, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. It is capable of 280.6 teraflops (or trillions of calculations per second)

— IBM dominates the highest tier of supercomputing and is behind six of the ten most powerful machines. The US had 281 of the Top500 list

Sources: Times archives/Top500.org

Explore Personal Tech

• InGear