EuroHPC 'Deucalion' to Be Built by Fujitsu and Installed in Portugal

Feb. 5, 2021 — The procurement contract for a new EuroHPC petascale supercomputer has been signed by the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) , the hosting entity, and Fujitsu, the selected vendor.

The new HPC system, to be located in Portugal, will be called “Deucalion”. It will be a petascale supercomputer, capable of peak performance of 10 petaflops or 10 million billion calculation per second. The machine will use ARM-based technology – the Fujitsu A64FX CPU currently used by Fugaku, the fastest supercomputer in the world at the moment.

Deucalion will be installed in the recently created Minho Advanced Computing Centre (MACC) of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) which is one of the four operational advanced computing centres in Portugal coordinated by FCT. Deucalion will provide a unique and innovative context to demonstrate green computing principles in Europe and worldwide by leveraging a fully sustainable infrastructure, co-funded by national science funds, European structural funds allocated to the North of Portugal and the Portuguese Fund to Support Innovation and the Energy Efficiency Fund (the latter within the remit of the Ministry for the Environment and Climate Action).

Manuel Heitor, the Portuguese Minister for Science, Technology and Higher Education, stated:

“Deucalion will be installed at the FCT`s Minho Advanced Computing Centre (MACC), in close collaboration with the municipality of Guimarães and the University of Minho, in northern Portugal, as part of a fully sustainable computing infrastructure aiming at promoting new advancements in the digital and green transitions, together with a new stimulus for regional cohesion and which will represent EUR 50 million of total investment. It will be an important achievement of the Portuguese Presidency of the European Union but also, and above all, a further step towards engaging every region in the wide European network of high-performance computing, as well as enabling digital infrastructures to foster new frontiers of knowledge across various disciplines and towards a better and greener future.”

João Pedro Matos Fernandes, the Portuguese Minister for the Environment and Climate Action, stated:

“Deucalion will be one of the first European high-performance computing project with a reduced level of carbon emissions, aligned with the European Green Deal. This supercomputer’s entire operation will be based on renewable energy sources, either by directly producing electricity from solar and wind technologies in a self-consumption logic, or by combining it with storage systems. Through the Innovation Support Fund and the Energy Efficiency Fund, Deucalion’s decarbonisation will be promoted, thus setting an example for supercomputers and data centres of the future. Certainly, a good and happy marriage between digital and green transitions!”

Anders Dam Jensen, the Executive Director of the EuroHPC JU stated:

“Delighted that we have signed the Deucalion petascale supercomputer contract. This latest agreement means that we have a seventh supercomputer joining the EuroHPC network! EuroHPC users will benefit from this latest supercomputer wherever they are in Europe. It will help to speed-up the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, better anticipate weather conditions or advance the frontiers of knowledge of matter. Such top-of-the-range system will also support our ambition of making Europe a global leader in HPC.”

Rui Oliveira, MACC´s Scientific Director, added:

“Deucalion has been designed to be a highly efficient state-of-the-art system excelling on traditional HPC workloads as well as on complex data analytics and machine learning. Besides being a key enabling infrastructure to many science domains, with its hybrid architecture, Deucalion aims at bolstering the national advance computing competences, both in academy and industry.

This new supercomputer is a joint and collaborative effort co-funded by FCT, the Portuguese Innovation Support Fund, the Portuguese Energy Efficiency Fund, the European Structural Funds of the North Region of Portugal, the municipality of Guimarães and the EuroHPC JU who will contribute EUR 6.95 million to the costs of Deucalion. Representing a joint investment of over EUR 20 million in the coming three years, this new supercomputer is expected to be operational by early 2022.”

Helena Pereira, President of FCT, stated:

“This new investment aims at fostering more and better science and enhancing innovation in Europe by providing access to a wide range of users from the research and scientific communities as well as from industry and the public sector to leading- edge HPC infrastructures and services.

This new supercomputer will support applications in many domains, including artificial intelligence, personalised medicine, drug and material design, bio-engineering, earth observation, and fight against climate change, cities, territories and mobility. The green computing concept to be developed with Deucalion is already a first and innovative step contributing to a sustainable and green society.”

Background

The company Fujitsu has been selected following a call for tender launched in March 2020.

The computing power of this new computing system will be complemented by four additional EuroHPC petascale supercomputers to be built in the following supercomputing centres: