The UK’s fastest supercomputer is about to get faster, thanks to a hardware upgrade planned for this year.

The High-End Computing Terascale Resource, or HECToR to its friends, is located at the University of Edinburgh and is used to process complex scientific problems, ranging from the genetic roots of cancer to the evolution of dinosaurs’ walking styles.

Supercomputer hardware vendor Cray, on whose technology HECToR is built, announced in May that it has signed a contract to expand and upgrade the system. It will increase its size, from 20 cabinets to 30, and upgrade all of its processors to the latest chips in AMD’s Opteron range.

Professor Arthur Trew, director of the university’s HPC spin-out, HPCX, said the upgrade “supports our efforts in establishing world-class facilities for research and innovation in the UK”, while Cray’s European president said it would allow researchers “to maintain their focus on pushing the frontiers of science”.

HECToR itself was unavailable for comment.