A supercomputer capable of 10 billion calculations a second and which may help scientists unravel the mysteries of the universe was being officially switched on today.

The £1.4 million Cosmology Machine was being unveiled at Durham University's physics department by Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt.

It will be used to make extremely complex calculations within seconds to test theories about how the universe was created.

The supercomputer will be the country's largest in academic use and will be in the top 10 biggest in the UK.

It has enough memory to be able to store all 10 million books in the British Library and still have space left over, a spokesman for the university said.

He added: "The Cosmology Machine takes data from billions of observations about the behaviour of stars, gases, galaxies and the mysterious dark matter throughout the universe and then calculates at ultra-high speed how galaxies and solar systems formed and evolved.

"By testing different theories of cosmic evolution, it can simulate virtual universes to test which ideas come closest to explaining the real universe."

The new computer was manufactured by Sun Microsystems and installed in Durham following a £652,000 grant from the Joint Research Equipment Initiative which was backed by the DTI's Office of Science and Technology.

It is to be used by the Institute for Computational Cosmology, whose director Professor Carlos Frenk said: "The new machine will allow us to recreate the entire evolution of the universe, from its hot Big Bang beginning to the present."

The Cosmology Machine forms the UK base of the Virgo consortium - a group of 30 researchers from Germany, Canada, the USA and this country whose long-term aims are to understand how the universe was created and how it evolved to its present state.