The HECToR service was run by partners including EPCC, Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG).
HECToR's initial configuration, known as Phase 1, featured 60 Cray XT4 cabinets containing 1416 compute blades, giving a total of 11,328 2.8 GHz AMD Opteron processor cores, connected to 576 terabytes of RAID backing storage, later increased to 934 TB.
[4] In August 2008, 28 Cray X2 Black Widow vector compute nodes were added to the system.
[4] In the summer of 2009, the XT4 cabinets were upgraded with quad-core 2.3 GHz Opteron processors with 8 GB memory each.
It involved extending the XT6 system to 30 cabinets containing 704 compute blades, and upgrading the processors to 16-core, 2.3 GHz Interlagos Opterons, giving a total of 90,112 cores.