Feb. 26, 2020 — On Friday, February 21, LUSITANIA III, the new supercomputer of Extremadura, was inaugurated at an event that took place at the headquarters of the COMPUTAEX Foundation in Cáceres, Spain. The event was chaired by D. Rafael Spain, Minister of Economy, Science and Digital Agenda of the Board of Extremadura and President of the Foundation; Mr. José Ignacio Doncel, Deputy Director General of Large Scientific-Technical Facilities of the Ministry of Science and Innovation; Mrs. María José Pulido Pérez, First Deputy Mayor and Councilor for Employment and Education of the City of Cáceres; Mr. Juan Castillo, IBM Systems Director for Spain, Portugal, Greece and Israel; Mr. Roberto Sebastián, CEO of IaaS365 and Mr. José Luis González, General Director of CénitS -COMPUTAEX.
The start-up of LUSITANIA III took place from 10:30 am, after the accreditation and reception of the attendees and the opening ceremony. Next, Ms. Elisa Martín, director of Technology and Innovation at IBM, presented on the topic “From Big Data to Quantum Computing through Artificial Intelligence.” Subsequently, after 11:30 a.m., the presentation of Ms. Nuria Oliver, “The tyranny of the data? The chiaroscuros of the use of algorithmic decisions” was delivered through videoconference. Next, Mr. David Palau, director of Cloud and Data Center of IaaS365, presented on “PaaS Solutions as a complement to HPC”. At 12:30 pm, Mr. David Cortés, head of the Functional Network and Communications Unit of CénitS, presented the paper “Science after data: knowledge extraction from mobile network information.”
The inauguration of LUSITANIA III represents a remarkable expansion of the computing resources offered by the COMPUTAEX Foundation, which in recent years has seen a considerable increase in the computing power offered by the Supercomputers LUSITANIA and LUSITANIA II at the CénitS Data Processing Center. Specifically, LUSITANIA III significantly increases the computing resources offered by the COMPUTAEX Foundation, reaching a total supercomputing calculation capacity of 93 teraflops plus 120 teraflops of graphic computing, over an InfiniBand network of up to 100 Gbps, and providing a total of 3,696 IBM Power9 cores and 40,960 Nvidia V100 CUDA cores, which will be available to researchers, innovators, technologists and all kinds of users who need their resources. LUSITANIA III has an IBM Power Systems architecture that stands out for its high storage capacities (IBM Elastic Storage) and calculation, as well as for the necessary software to facilitate its use and make the most of the available resources.
Funded by the Ministry of Economy, Science and Digital Agenda of the Board of Extremadura, through the General Secretariat of Science, Technology, Innovation and University, with ERDF funds, this new Supercomputer is now available to researchers, innovators, technologists and all kinds of users who need their resources.
Source: CénitS