Inauguration of MACC – Minho Advanced Computing Center

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

The launch 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 contribute to strengthening the "Iberian Advanced Computing Network – RICA" and to the launch of national participation in the European initiative "EuroHPC – European High Performance Computing."

MACC is installed in REN's data center 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 they 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 computing performance. It was installed in recent 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 systems), known as "BOB."

On June 12, the European Commission approved the installation of a second petascale computer at MACC, as part of the European EuroHPC initiative, capable of performing 10 PFlops, or 10 trillion operations per second. This computer, named "Deucalion," will be installed by the end of 2020, reinforcing the current BOB and expanding the range of activities available at MACC. In addition, 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 trillion calculations per second, placing them among the five most powerful supercomputers in the world.

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

The installation of 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 national scientific and technological community to carry out work in the fields of intensive computing, data science, and artificial intelligence. In the business world, 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.