Work begins on UK's new £750m supercomputer Construction work has started on the UK's new £750m national supercomputer. Those behind the project say it will be the most powerful computer in the UK, and one of the most powerful in the world, when it is finished at the end of next year. It will be hosted in University of Edinburgh buildings on the outskirts of Penicuik and Roslin in Midlothian, near the institute where Dolly the sheep was cloned. It is a significant step forward for a project that was shelved by the UK government when Labour came into power, and then reinstated a year later. What is a supercomputer? The team behind the supercomputer, and researchers who hope to use it, say they are very excited about the project. As the name would suggest, a supercomputer is a very powerful machine. The numbers for this new one are mind-boggling. Prof Mark Parsons, the director of the supercomputer project at the university, says it will be roughly the size of a medium-sized supermarket. It has thousands of processers and will be able to make a billion - billion calculations per second. That's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. Prof Parsons said the computer would help researchers and commercial companies to "simulate the world around them". It will do that by taking huge amounts of data, and creating models of things that are not easy to do an experiment on in a laboratory. He added: "Supercomputers model things that happen too quickly, like quantum; that are too large, like an earthquake; or too long - like the expansion of the universe." What will the new supercomputer do? The UK's previous national supercomputer - ARCHER2 - is also at the same site, and will come to the end of its life at the end of this year.