’We need supercomputers - for designing aircraft wings to making climate predictions’

The official opening of the supercomputer DelftBlue will take place on 30 September at the Prinsenhof in Delft, also marking the fifth anniversary of the TU Delft Institute for Computational Science & Engineering. The programme features scientists and companies working with supercomputers, explaining the importance of supercomputing for healthcare, logistics and the energy transition. "Making predictions with computers is a relatively new but important part in science. And for making complicated calculations you need big computers." Martin van Gijzen, Professor of High-Performance Computing at TU Delft (EWI), explains why supercomputers are becoming increasingly important for solving today's big challenges. "Predicting flow around an aircraft wing requires a complex and time-consuming calculation. And to design a wing, you have to do a lot of these calculations. For this kind of calculation, you actually never have enough computing power and so you have to use the fastest, biggest computers." Several TU Delft faculties already had cluster computers, but they did not yet have the same computing power as the DelftBlue.