Photos: The top five UK supercomputing projects

Want to travel back in time to the Big Bang, unlock the secrets of the human genome or discover alien worlds? Get yourself a supercomputer.

Scientists across the UK are using the monsters of computing, thousands of times more powerful than the average desktop, to help answer these big questions.

silicon.com's round-up of pioneering high-performance computing (HPC) research in the UK starts in Cambridge, where the supercomputer Darwin is being used to look back at the formative years of the universe, just hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang.

Darwin will process information from the Planck satellite, the European Space Agency's telescope launched last week. The telescope, shown here, uses supercooled receivers to take precise measurements of cosmic microwave background radiation.

This radiation is what remains of light from the Big Bang explosion and using its 2,340 Intel processing cores, Darwin will run simulations of how the universe evolved to leave the background radiation we see today.

Hundreds of terabytes of raw data are streamed to Darwin to run the simulations.

Paul Calleja, director of HPC services at Cambridge University, said: "There is quite a complex series of operations that have to be run in sequence to avoid inefficiencies."

The simulations will help answer questions such as whether the universe will continue its expansion forever or will collapse into a Big Crunch and how old is the universe, as well as shedding light on the mysterious nature of dark matter and energy.

Photo credit: ESA – D. Ducros