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Inauguration of MACC - Minho Advanced Computing Centre

The first supercomputer operating in Portugal will be inaugurated on July 5, Friday, at 12:00 p.m., in Riba d'Ave, in Minho, and it will allow the start of the activities of the Minho Advanced Computing Centre (MACC) of the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), and namely the increase of the national computing capacity by about 10 times.

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The entry into operation of this supercomputer, under the scope of the National Digital Skills Initiative - INCoDE.2030 and in the context of the National Strategy for Advanced Computing, will boost Portugal's current participation in the different European networks and consortia involved in the use and development of computing. It will also contribute to the strengthening of the "Iberian Network for Advanced Computing - RICA" and to the start of national participation in the European initiative "EuroHPC - European High performance Computing".

 

 

The MACC is installed at the REN datacentre and is managed in a segregated manner by REN, NOS and EDP. The systems are already installed in the area operated by NOS, and it is intended that it 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, under 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 MACC of a second "petascale" level computer, as part of the European "EuroHPC" initiative, capable of executing 10 PFlops, or 10 billion operations per second. This computer, named "Deucalion", will be installed by the end of 2020, reinforcing the current BOB and widening the range of activities to be provided by the MACC. Additionally, Portugal is also participating in another proposal approved by the European Commission to install a "pre-exascale" type supercomputer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación. These machines will be capable of executing more than 175 PFlops, or 175 billion calculations per second, and will be included among the 5 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

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

The installation of MACC will bring new opportunities for 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 to the entire community of the national scientific and technological system to carry out work in the areas of intensive computing, data science and artificial intelligence. In business, 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's program.