Manchester now boasts the world's most powerful supercomputer devoted to open academic research. The Silicon Graphics T3E-1200E is in a Pounds 26 million research facility funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Capable of performing 700 billion calculations per second, it is ranked at number seven in the independent listing of world supercomputers at www.top500.org. It is likely to be used for climate research, ocean modelling, materials science, biomolecular modelling and computational fluid dynamics.