1 april 2010 - The Mathematics & Computer Science Department has acquired a computer with one terabyte of main working memory. The computer, called Mammoth, is the successor to Olifant, which had a working memory of 128 gigabytes. Mammoth is composed of seven computers that are able to communicate very fast indeed. As a result, the working memory (the equivalent of 250 standard computers) can be used in such a way that the purchase of a real supercomputer was not necessary. Mammoth is composed of standard hardware of Dell (type M710, with 144 gigabytes of memory each) and has ‘only’ cost the Department one hundred thousand euros. The computer will be used for conducting calculations of models of computer software in inter alia the Design and Analysis of Systems group of prof. Jan Friso Groote: “Software has become so inhumanly complex that we can only understand it by means of models. And even those models are so huge that we need machines with vast amounts of working memory to complete the mathematical analyses successfully.”