Heating homes with supercomputers

Did you know that Britain has a national supercomputer? It’s hosted at the Advanced Computing Facility at the University of Edinburgh and it’s used on our crunchiest problems, such as climate modelling or processing health data. It’s in the news this week because of a trial of a new heating idea – an idea that chimes nicely with the seasonal heat storage technologies I was writing about recently.

Supercomputers generate an enormous amount of heat and need to be kept cool. This heat is often ...