Opening of MACC – Minho Advanced Computing Center

The first supercomputer to operate in Portugal will be inaugurated on Friday, July 5th, at 12:00 pm, in Riba d'Ave, in Minho, and will allow the start of activities at the Minho Advanced Computing Centre (MACC) of the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), and in particular the increase of national computing capacity by around 10 times.

The entry into operation of this supercomputer, within the scope of the National Digital Skills Initiative – INCoDE.2030 and in the context of the National Strategy for Advanced Computing , boosts Portugal's current participation in the different European networks and consortia involved in the use and development of computing. It will also contribute to strengthening the “Iberian Advanced Computing Network – RICA” and to launching national participation in the European initiative “EuroHPC – European High Performance Computing ”.

MACC is installed in REN's datacentre and is managed separately by REN, NOS and EDP. The systems are already installed in the area operated by NOS, and are intended to be powered mainly by renewable energy sources provided 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 during 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 Centre, TACC). It also includes a total of 800 computing nodes (interconnection between systems), called “BOB”.

On June 12, the European Commission approved the installation at the MACC of a second “petascale” computer, within the scope of the European “EuroHPC” initiative, capable of executing 10 PFlops, or 10 billion operations per second. This computer, called “Deucalion”, will be installed by the end of 2020, reinforcing the current BOB and expanding the range of activities to be made available by MACC. Furthermore, Portugal also participates in another proposal approved by the European Commission to install a supercomputer, of the “pre-exascale” type, at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación. These machines will be capable of performing more than 175 PFlops, or 175 billion calculations per second, making them among the 5 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

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

The installation of the MACC will bring new opportunities to Portugal, whether for research groups dedicated to supercomputing or 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 to the entire community of the national scientific and technological system, for carrying out work in the field of intensive calculation, data science and artificial intelligence. In the business sector, it will contribute to increasing the capacity for design, optimization and validation of new products and services, creating added value for the Portuguese economy. 

Check the event schedule .