Argentina will have one of the 100 most powerful computers in the world

The Minister of Defense, Jorge Taiana, and his counterpart for Science, Technology and Innovation, Daniel Filmus, announced this afternoon the purchase of a supercomputer for open use to the entire Science and Technology System, which represents an important contribution to science, technology and national innovation.

“Much of the future is linked to the ability we have to appropriate new technology, science, the leaps and advances that reality is making,” said Taiana during the announcement of the supercomputer, the only one in Latin America, with a computing power that today places it in the 82nd position in the world ranking.

And he added: “We want to become a player who is not simply a recipient of this technology, but is also a creator who has the ability to use it and not just be a consumer of technology,” said the portfolio holder.

Immediately afterwards, Taiana referred to the decision to install this supercomputer in the National Meteorological Service: “That this supercomputer is installed here, in an institution that is in the orbit of the Minister of Defense, which celebrated 150 years of its foundation, has to to do not only with the development of science, but also with the reaffirmation of sovereignty”, and continued: “If we remember the first Antarctic presence at the Orcadas base, it is a meteorological station of the National Meteorological Service that gave hybridization between science, technology, sovereignty and development.”

“There is an expertise here in the treatment of these enormous amounts of data, which today is presented as a fundamental tool for many areas of knowledge,” said Taiana.

For its part, Filmus thanked everyone who worked to make it possible, the CICyT, and highlighted the three large companies that bid: “This situation is superior, being in the Top 500 and among the first two in Latin America. A development that has access to the entire scientific-technological system for which we have to generate this look. The Ministry is a part of Science and Technology and we have to move forward jointly and in relation to the work with the Defense portfolio, he expressed “it is not by chance. It is about the sovereignty of science and technology. Those who monopolize knowledge also monopolize rights.”

The Minister stated that “in every decision there are arbitrary paths. Our arbitrariness is on the side of sovereignty, where science and technology play a central role and that value can be added from the capacity of our researchers, which is the best we have” and he underlined “the joy of work with Jorge Taiana because there is a common perspective on sovereignty and work at the service of the needs of our people”.

The supercomputer, which will provide calculation services using state-of-the-art technology, is 40 times more powerful than Huayra Muyu, the most powerful computer installed today in the country and used by the National Meteorological Service (SMN) to make its operational forecast.

The award is made within the framework of the National Supercomputing Initiative, jointly implemented between the Defense, Science, Technology and Innovation portfolios, the SMN and CONICET.

The equipment is provided by the company Lenovo for a value of 885 million pesos and will be installed in the SMN Computer Center where space adaptation works will be carried out at a cost of 265 million pesos that will be financed by Defense.

Present were the Secretary of Research, Industrial Policy and Production for Defense, Daniela Castro; the deputy director of the National Meteorological Service, Claudia Campetella; the secretaries of Planning and Policies in Science, Technology and Innovation, Diego Hurtado and of Technological Scientific Articulation, Juan Pablo Paz; the Undersecretaries of Institutional Evaluation, Gabriela Dranovsky and Institutional Coordination, Pablo Alfredo Nuñez; representatives of organizations and institutions of science and technology and authorities of the Lenovo company.

TECHNICAL CHARACTERISTICS

The supercomputer has a calculation capacity in accelerators (GPUs): 15.39 PFLOPs Rpeak (1 Peta FLOP is 1015 floating point operations per second), calculation capacity in processors (CPUs): 442.36 TFLOPs, 296 Intel Pontevecchio accelerators and 5120 cores on INTEL Sapphire Rapids HBM processors.

A storage system of 1.66 Petabytes (1,660,000 Gigabytes). The network for internal interconnection between its nodes is 400 Gigabytes per second. It has direct water cooling. Its electrical consumption is 233 KW. Both accelerators (GPUs) and processors (CPUs) are the newest from Intel and correspond to the latest technology in processors.

With information from argentina.gob.ar