Edinburgh University is to be home to the one of the world's most advanced super-computers. And even though the most Luddite of technophobes might not yet know it, this is excellent news not only for Scotland but for the entire world.

For when it goes live from a secret location around Edinburgh in October, Hector - for that is the computer's name - will enable scientists from all over the UK to carry out remotely the most complex and varied research it is possible to do.

This will include forecasting climate change, simulating ocean currents, projecting the spread of epidemic diseases and developing new drugs (the computer can replicate organs such as the heart). Old-fashioned theory and experiment are all very well, but it seems that in modern science, computed simulation is the future.

Although its name is actually derived from the acronym of its upper-scale potential (High End Computing Terascale Resources), Hector's nominal associations with the mighty Trojan war hero are reassuring.

The ancient soldier prince's bravery and chivalrous spirit earned him the glory of bagging the very last line of Homer's epic war poem, the Iliad.

And even if the battles 21st-century Hector will fight are somewhat more sophisticated than its ancient namesake's, it, too, has to stay one step ahead of the enemy at all times. Thankfully, its prowess is so great that it will help UK scientists to compete internationally in the fight to save the planet.

Super-computers have come a long way from the days of Bletchley Park and the attempts to break the Enigma code. In the 1980s, the Cray 2 super-computer was reckoned to be around a billion times as fast as a pocket calculator. Today's leading supercompter - IBM's BlueGene - is 1000 times as fast again. Indeed, the pace of technological advance means that today a single modern desktop PC is now more powerful than a 15-year-old super-computer.

Yet by any stretch of the imagination, this clever new Hector (which is being made by Cray) is quick. It will be capable of 60 thousand billion calculations per second, will have 35,000 gigabytes of memory, and storage of 700,000 GBs to call upon.

It costs £113m and, with the performance of about 14,000 desktops, is three times faster than HPCX, the existing super-computer currently used for academic research by Edinburgh University's Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC).

Hector is being paid for by the government-funded UK Research Council, which has an annual budget of £2bn to boost British academic study.

Hector will even attempt to answer questions about the evolution of the universe. Whether, like the fictional computer Deep Thought, it will be asked the answer to "life, the universe and everything" and come up with the mysterious 42, remains to be seen. Of course Deep Thought was imagined by Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and was created by a pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings. It spawned the moniker Deep Blue which was given by IBM to the super-intelligent computer that competed successfully against world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

What Hector will actually look like remains a mystery, for it is being built at a secret location somewhere in Midlothian.

It will cover an area the size of two tennis courts and will have a lifespan of just seven years. Thus his reputation is already gaining mythical proportions.