Making ice cream is not as easy as you think. For commercial manufacturers, perfecting the recipe is so important that they have to model its properties on a supercomputer. To do that, it requires one with 1,872 processors.

According to a team of researchers at the University of Edinburgh, UK who studied what it takes to make ice cream, supercomputers can be pretty useful when it comes to the ice cream industry. Theoretical models might be good, but to get useful results requires crunching some serious numbers.

To do that, a supercomputer lets the researchers simulate subtle differences in ingredient mixtures, suspensions and the formation of liquid crystals to make the end result. The research not only improves the quality of the ice cream, it also improves its shelf life too.

The supercomputer will have to crunch some serious numbers, so the team uses a 10 cabinet XK6 Cray supercomputer, consisting of 1,872 processors, made up of 936 CPUs, each supported by 32 GB of RAM and 936 GPUs. All this just for ice cream.

[Nvidia Image by TheCulinaryGeek under Creative Commons license]