The world’s first personal supercomputer - a machine 250 times faster than the average PC – was unveiled yesterday. It will go on sale for more than £4,000, beyond the reach of most consumers but a tiny fraction of what computers with similar capabilities usually cost.

The Tesla supercomputers have such immense power they should be able to help doctors to process the results for brain and body scans much more quickly, allowing them to tell patients within hours instead of days whether they have a tumour.

Scientists believe that they could help to find cures for diseases such as cancer and malaria faster than traditional research, because they can run hundreds of thousands of simulations to create a shortlist of the drugs that are most likely to offer the potential for a cure.

David Kirk, chief scientist at NVIDIA, the American company that has designed the new technology, said: “Pretty much anything that you do on your PC that takes a lot of time can be accelerated with this.”

Previous supercomputers have been massive systems consisting of thousands of machines housed in huge rooms, costing millions of pounds to build and maintain. In comparison, Tesla personal supercomputers will cost between £4,000 and £8,000 and look like the PC that many people already have in their homes.

“These supercomputers can improve the time it takes to process information by 1,000 times,” Dr Kirk said. “If you imagine it takes a week to get a result [from running an experiment], you can only do it 52 times a year. If it takes you minutes, you can do it constantly, and learn just as much in a day.”

The new computers make innovative use of graphics processing units (GPUs) – a technological breakthrough, the company says, that could bring lightning speeds to the next generation of home computers.

Tesla supercomputers became available to British customers yesterday, having been released in the US last month. They will be sold initially to the scientific and research community and universities. The PC maker Dell, however, said that it would soon be producing them and they will be available to everyone. Eric Greffier, a Dell senior executive, said: “Before mobile phones were reserved for the few, now we can’t live without them. It will be the same with these supercomputers. They are the building block for the computing of the future.”

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