LONDON, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- Britain officially opened Tuesday its whizziest new computer, going by the name of HECToR (high-end computing terascale resource).

    The computer's 60 teraflops (trillion operations per second) have been up and running since autumn 2007, but Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling Tuesday marks the official start by unveiling a plaque at Edinburgh University's Advanced Computing Facility, BBC reported.

    HECToR is four times more powerful than Britain's previous best computer HPCx, which will continue to run. However, HECToR ranks only 17th in the list of the world's most powerful computers (as measured against the popular TOP500 list).

    According to the report, the machine will be used by up to a thousand groups of scientists to model complex systems. Each user's proposal for time on the machine will have to go through a peer-review process.

    Chemists, engineers and physicists will be lining up to use the computer to predict the properties of materials, or to study how they behave under extreme conditions, for example.

    The supercomputer is unlikely to change much for some of Britain's largest consumers of computer power, including the Met Office Hadley Center for Climate Change.

    HECToR will be used in collaborative work between the Hadley Center and the Natural Environment Research Council, with the details yet to be decided.

    HECToR will run for six years and will be upgraded in two years to be five times more powerful than it is now.