THE meaning of life, the universe and everything has puzzled mankind since time immemorial. Since man dragged himself from the Proterozoic ooze, climbed down from the trees and stood upright for the first time, he's wondered what it's all really about.

And generation after generation of philosopher, and latterly scientist, has missed more than the odd night's sleep asking why do we bother at all? Theory upon theory has been the result, but mankind isn't that much further forward than the time when he beat out his treatise with a jawbone on a particularly resonant rock.

However, that could be about to change. Man, in his wisdom, has just created a super-computer in an attempt to find the answer to the ultimate question - and its home is in the North-East.

The Cosmology Machine is not your average computer. Filling an entire room, its banks of processors hum as it undertakes billions of calculations each second. This is the engine room of Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) and the equipment which could provide the answers to age-old questions about the origins and development of the universe.

"Cosmology confronts some of the most fundamental questions in the whole of science," says the ICC's director, Professor Carlos Frenk.

"How and when did our universe begin? What is it made of? How did it acquire its current appearance? How will it end? These are all questions that have preoccupied mankind since the beginning of civilisation but which only relatively recently have become accessible to established scientific methodology. Recent advances suggest that these and related questions will be answered in the next few years through a combination of astronomical observations and computer simulations."

The £1.4m Cosmology Machine, which tests theories of cosmic evolution by simulating the development of the universe, will be at the forefront of these studies. It was switched on earlier this week by Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt and has already embarked on its first simulation programme.

Because of its sheer size, capacity and speed, it will revolutionise the work being carried out at Durham and enable researchers to look at the universe in unprecedented detail. The largest cosmological calculation to date was carried out using a super-computer in Munich but it was not sufficiently detailed to show individual galaxies.

Prof Frenk, explains: "In spite of the spectacular achievements of the past two decades, even the largest super-computers today are still too small to recreate our universe in the detail required for a full interpretation of astronomical data. This new machine will allow us to create the entire evolution of the universe, from its hot Big Bang beginning to the present.

"In close connection with astronomical data collected with a new generation of giant telescopes and space observatories, these calculations will confront one of the grandest challenges in science: the understanding of how our universe was created and how it evolved."

The Cosmology Machine, manufactured by Sun Microsystems, is an integrated cluster of high-powered computer processors, thousands of times more powerful than a PC. It is the largest computer being used for academic research in the UK and one of the ten largest machines in Europe. It can perform a staggering 200 billion calculations per second - the same number of operations it would take one person about a million years of continuous calculation to complete. Its vast memory could hold the contents of the ten million books in the British Library and would still have space left over.

This all sounds very impressive but what does it actually do?

For those without a knowledge of physics, both its work and the subject matter are almost too complex to comprehend. During the past 40 years, astronomers have been gathering information which supports the theory that our universe began ten billion years ago in a cosmic explosion known as the Big Bang. But although theories have been put forward about the way in which the universe subsequently developed, they are still to be tested.

Scientists are currently working on the idea that the Big Bang generated radiation, which can be detected today as background microwaves. In 1993, a satellite discovered tiny ripples in the radiation, which cosmologists believe were amplified by gravity following the Big Bang and, over ten billion years of cosmic evolution, produced the structures of the universe.

Observatories and satellites peer into the cosmos every day, collecting huge amounts of astronomical information about the behaviour of stars, gases, galaxies and the mysterious dark matter which makes up around 90 per cent of the universe. The Cosmology Machine takes data from billions of these observations and then, using assumptions input by scientists and the laws of physics, it calculates how galaxies and solar systems formed and evolved. The result is a virtual universe.

Prof Frenk and his team believe the Cosmology Machine will be invaluable to their work, which could provide answers to some of the most important cosmological questions within the next few years. "We are currently on the verge of major breakthroughs, which will resolve, once and for all, issues of such fundamental importance as the geometry of the universe, the nature of the cosmic dark matter and the origin of galaxies," he says.

The ICC is already a leading international centre for research and is the British base of the Virgo Consortium for Cosmological Simulations, a group of 30 researchers from across Europe and America exploring the origins and evolution of the universe. Its long-term goals are to understand the formation of structures in the universe, to establish the properties of dark matter and to relate the Big Bang theory to astronomical observations.

The supercomputer was installed at Durham with the help of a £652,000 grant from the Joint Research Equipment Initiative, a body set up by the DTI, the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the research councils.

Its launch is one of the ongoing developments in Durham University's Physics Department, and it marked the start of a new multi-million initiative to develop an international centre of excellence.

The Ogden Centre for Fundamental Physics contains two research institutes: both the ICC and the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology. Named after the benefactor businessman and Durham physics graduate, Dr Peter Ogden, it will be in a building adjacent to the existing physics department due to be completed in the summer of 2002.