University College London has signed a deal with Dell to build one of the world's largest supercomputers in the UK.

The 21-tonne Legion machine will use seven kilometres of cabling and offer a peak performance of 42.9 teraflops per second while consuming 19,000 litres of air per second for cooling.

Professor David Price, executive dean of the Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at UCL, said: "High-end supercomputing used to be the preserve of an elite few in the academic world, but not anymore.

"It is our goal to create a central high-performance computing resource from which our 16,000 researchers across all disciplines at UCL can benefit, especially in the biomedical science area where we are seeing increasing uptake. "

The new computer will be used in a variety of applications, including modelling blood flow in the brains of stroke victims, simulating nerve responses in real time and attempting to simulate deep space to find clues about the nature of dark matter.

"UCL researchers are conducting research with high-performance computing that will accrue benefits for society for years to come," said Dell chief executive Michael Dell in a statement.

The Legion system will be built with £3.85m in funding from the Science Research Infrastructure Fund.

It will use 2,560 processor cores based on Intel's dual-core technology, a symmetric multiprocessing computer cluster of 96 processor cores and 192TB of high-performance storage.