Dell, which made its name selling budget PCs, is extending its low-cost ethos to the world of supercomputing, unveiling a new machine in London that will be used to pioneer research into areas as diverse as personalised cures for cancer and the origins of the universe.

The move comes amid burgeoning competition in "mass market" supercomputers, as the use of commoditised parts drives down prices and opens up new fields of research.

The Legion supercomputer will weigh in at 21 tonnes and have the power of nearly 3,000 desktop PCs. It was unveiled at University College London (UCL) today by Michael Dell, the company’s founder, who resumed the role of chief executive this year.

According to UCL researchers, Legion, which is being built by Dell from industry standard components to cap costs, could presage an age in which medical surgeries each have access to massively powerful machines to run complex calculations to determine the best treatment for individual patients.

The task of writing code that exploits the full capacity of Legion's peak performance – an expected 42.9 teraflops (or trillion calculations per second) – is also expected to have knock-on effects for the computer-driven trading models used in the City, a destination for many of UCL's students.

"Using industry standards-based technology, rather than high-priced proprietary systems, researchers have access to previously unavailable levels of computing power, at a remarkably lower cost," Mr Dell told Times Online.

Legion's power highlights the pace of advance in the sector – it was November 2000 when the first supercomputer passed 4 teraflops.

The aggregate computing power represented by the current Top 500 list of the most powerful machines is now 4.9 petaflops (thousand trillion calculations per second), nearly double the 2.8 petaflops of the 2006 report. The figures suggest that Moore's Law, which says, roughly, that computing power doubles at the same price point every two years, remains alive and well.

Dell currently has 24 machines on the Top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. It is ramping up its presence in the field at the same time as it battles to regain ground on Hewlett Packard, which has taken its crown as the largest PC maker, in the consumer market.

The latest Top 500 list showed that the supercomputer market is still dominated by IBM, with 40 per cent of the systems on the list, and Hewlett-Packard, with 38 per cent. No other manufacturer broke the 5 per cent mark – though Dell came close at 4.8 per cent.

The IBM Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California remained the world's most powerful computer. The machine, which can perform more than 280 trillion calculations a second, is twice as fast as the No 2 system.

Competition to supply supercomputers is increasing, however, as high-performance systems come within the reach of more groups. Earlier this year, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard extended a marketing pact designed to capture more of the growing market.

Legion is being built on a “cluster” model, which will harness the power of 2,560 processor cores based on Intel Dual-core technology – now commonly found in laptop machines available on the high street.

Professor David Price, chairman of the UCL Research Computing Sub-Committee, said: "High-end supercomputing used to be the preserve of an elite few in the academic world, but not any more."

The new fields that Legion opens up for research at UCL include the modelling of blood flows through the brains of stroke victims. Using the data gleaned, consultants will test treatments and then alter their prognosis.

Researchers in UCL's department of physics and astronomy, meanwhile, will perform the most detailed simulations ever conducted of cold dark matter structure formation in the universe. "This will test our understanding of the origin of galaxies and of gravity itself," UCL said.

The project is being funded with £3.85 million from the Science Research Infrastructure Fund, a government body. UCL also hopes that the agreement underpinning Legion will give it greater access to third-party contributors such as Intel.

Times Recommends

• Lies and cover-up at MG Rover exposed by report
• High oil prices push manufacturing costs up
• Primark founder steps down as chief executive