Today’s supercomputers are the most powerful calculating machines ever invented, capable of performing more than a thousand million million calculations every second. This gives scientists and engineers a powerful new tool to study the natural world – computer simulation.

This run of the course will be unfacilitated, meaning that the educators won’t be able to join the discussions themselves or respond to individual comments. However, the course still encourages a strong learning community focussed around debate and discussion - supporting other learners, sharing your own experience and knowledge, and listening to new perspectives.

Using supercomputers, we can now conduct virtual experiments that are impossible in the real world – from looking deep inside individual atoms, to studying the future climate of the earth and following the evolution of the entire universe from the big bang.

Discover how supercomputers are powering scientific breakthroughs

This free online course will introduce you to what supercomputers are, how they are used and how we can exploit their full computational potential to make scientific breakthroughs.

Over five weeks, we’ll look at:

• supercomputers: introducing supercomputing terminology and some of the largest machines in the world.
• parallel computers: how they are built from hundreds of thousands of CPUs, each similar to those in a desktop PC.
• parallel computing: using parallel processing to harness the power of all of those CPUs for a single calculation.
• computer simulation: how we can perform virtual experiments to make real-life predictions.
• case studies: how supercomputing is making scientific breakthroughs that were never possible before.