The £500,000 High Performance Computer (HPC) will help the University's Faculty of Engineering and Institute for Complex Systems tackle some of the most challenging engineering problems, from re-imagining aeroplane design for the best fuel efficiency to working out how to store hydrogen in nanoporous materials.

Project leader Professor Jason Reese of the University's Department of Mechanical Engineering, said: "Our new HPC - and a newly appointed HPC Officer to support its users - will be central to a wide range of pioneering research projects, including the simulation of fluids at the nanoscale, the prediction of welding distortion, and the aerodynamics of future space re-entry vehicles.

"This state-of-the-art facility will help us perform engineering and scientific modelling to a level of detail that would not be possible using physical experiments. The investment reflects Strathclyde's vision to be a leading international technological university."

With 1,088 computing elements (cores) writing to a 100TB high performance disk storage area across a state-of-the art Quad Data Rate Infiniband network, the HPC is designed for a peak performance of almost 13 TeraFlops - or thirteen thousand billion mathematical operations per second.

Professor Reese added: "The arrival of the new HPC will dramatically increase the university's computational capabilities, and demonstrates to other researchers in the UK and further afield that Strathclyde champions leading-edge computational research."

To find out more about Strathclyde research, visit: www.strath.ac.uk/research