Inauguration of MACC - Minho Advanced Computing Centre

The first supercomputer to operate in Portugal will be inaugurated on Friday, July 5, at 12 noon, in Riba d'Ave, Minho, and will allow the start-up of the activities of the Minho Advanced Computing Center (MACC) of the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), and in particular the increase of national computing capacity by around 10 times.

The commissioning of this supercomputer, as part of the National Digital Skills Initiative - INCoDE.2030 and in the context of the National Advanced Computing Strategy, will boost Portugal's current participation in the various European networks and consortia involved in the use and development of computing. It will also help strengthen the "Iberian Network for Advanced Computing - RICA" and kick-start Portugal's participation in the European initiative "EuroHPC - European High Performance Computing".

The MACC is installed in REN's datacenter and is managed separately by REN, NOS and EDP. The systems are already installed in the area operated by NOS, and it is intended that it will be powered mainly by renewable energy sources supplied by EDP, namely wind and hydroelectric power. The MACC supercomputer has a memory capacity of 266TBytes, 1PByte of storage and 1 PFlop of calculation performance, and was installed over the last few months as part of the renewal of the partnership between FCT and the University of Texas at Austin (through the Texas Advanced Computing Center, TACC). It also includes a total of 800 computing nodes (interconnection between the systems), known as "BOB".

On June 12, the European Commission approved the installation at the MACC of a second "petascale" level computer, as part of the European "EuroHPC" initiative, capable of executing 10 PFlops, or 10,000 billion operations per second. This computer, called "Deucalion", will be installed by the end of 2020, reinforcing the current BOB and broadening the range of activities to be provided by the MACC. Portugal is also participating in another proposal approved by the European Commission to install a "pre-exascale" supercomputer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación. These machines will be capable of performing more than 175 PFlops, or 175,000 billion calculations per second, making them among the 5 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

During the inauguration, two collaboration protocols with FCT will be signed, namely: one with REN and NOS, for the operation and use of the BOB supercomputer, under which FCT will open Calls to support new R&D projects annually for a total of 2 million euros; and another with REN, NOS and EDP, which aims to promote the use of advanced computing in application areas with direct interest and return for the economy.

The installation of the MACC will bring new opportunities to Portugal, both for research groups dedicated to supercomputing and for a growing group of research and work areas with digital information processing needs, such as medicine, earth and space, physics and mobility. The increase in available computing capacity will allow easier access for the entire community of the national scientific and technological system to carry out work in the fields of intensive computation, data science and artificial intelligence. In the business community, it will contribute to increasing the capacity to design, optimize and validate new products and services, creating added value for the Portuguese economy. 

See the event program.