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COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY:The information technology revolution is old news but one area is developing at breakneck speed, with Ireland playing a leading role in its development: meet the super-computer

Super-computing or, more broadly, high-performance computing (HPC) is about as far removed from the world of e-mail, web browsing and Facebook as you can get. In a nutshell, super-computers are simply very fast computers, but there’s a lot more to the industry than that: the goal of super-computing – pure calculation speed – means these machines are used for computations in everything from climate research to oil and gas exploration, as well as military defence and “econophysics”, the place where banking and physics meet head-on.