Brit scientist redesigns the computer

Traditional computer design is being rehashed by a British scientist who claims today's designs can't cope with the internet.

Geoff Barrell, founder and CTO of network storage company BlueArc, has developed a set of chips that enable computers to concentrate on shifting high volumes of data at fast speeds over the net, rather than churning slowly through lengthy decoding and recoding processes that could use up to 40 per cent of computational power.

Donal Madden, spokesman at BlueArc, said: "We have designed a computer specifically for moving information. We made a chipset dedicated to computing information only, therefore removing the traditional bottleneck of information coming off the network."

"Our servers can deliver up to 10 times the speed of an average server because we use hardware instead of software, which is faster," he added.

Madden claims the new split processing servers will be advantageous to medical research companies and similar organisations that need high performance machines to process complex data.

Companies currently using the hardware include Juniper Networks, extreme Networks and research lab, Rutherford Appleton in Oxfordshire.