EuroHPC’s Deucalion inaugurated in Portugal, promoting Europe’s high-performance computing

September 6, 2023 — This week, Deucalion, the European High Performance Computing Joint Venture (EuroHPC JU) supercomputer located in Portugal, was inaugurated by Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa at Minho University in Guimaraes.

The Portuguese Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education, Elvira Fortunato, President of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Madalena Alves, Deputy General Director of the Media, Content and Technology Network of the European Commission (CNECT), Thomas Skordas and EuroHPC JU CEO Anders Dam Jensen attended the ceremony.

Deucalion is a peta-sized system capable of performing more than 10 petaflops or 10 quadrillion calculations per second, provided by Fujitsu Technology Solutions. Deucalion is a unique EuroHPC supercomputer that combines the ARM A64FX processor and Bull Sequana technology, provided by Eviden, the Atos-owned business in advanced computing. This makes Deucalion the first EuroHPC supercomputer based on ARM processors, thereby paving the way for the European Processors Initiative (EPI) to develop economical processors and accelerators. European energy.

Deucalion is the most powerful supercomputer in Portugal. Its compute capabilities will be made available to users in Portugal and throughout Europe, giving them access to a new design that enriches a diverse and complementary set of computing architectures. supplements are already available in EuroHPC systems.

Deucalion’s architecture makes it perfect when used to advance research and development in many fields, for example in meteorology and climate modeling, fluid dynamics and aerodynamics, physics astrophysics and cosmology, as well as technologies to improve the energy efficiency of computing infrastructure. It will also drive innovation in areas such as artificial intelligence, personalized medicine, drug/drug and new materials design, firefighting, territory planning as well as smart mobility and transportation self-propelled facility.

Anders Dam Jensen, chief executive officer of EuroHPC JU, said: “I extend a warm welcome to Deucalion as the newest addition to our expanding family of EuroHPC supercomputers. Deucalion is another proof of Europe’s dedication to technological excellence and collaborative innovation. Today’s inauguration is a new milestone towards our mission to make Europe a global leader in high-performance computing.”

“There is a significant shortage of computing resources, both nationally and collectively, in Portugal,” said João Nuno Ferreira, general coordinator of the FCT’s FCCN Unit. In addition, the European Union is experiencing a growing disparity in supercomputing capabilities relative to other developed regions of the world. To address this issue, the EuroHPC Joint Commitment was established with the aim of promoting supercomputing in Europe. Portugal took this opportunity to make significant strides in this area, while ensuring national integration into the new EuroHPC supercomputer network and securing European co-financing.”

Madalena Alves, President of FCT said: “The Deucalion supercomputer is capable of supporting more than 200 projects annually and can multiply the national computing capacity tenfold. High-performance computing often comes with a high cost. By making this resource accessible to all researchers, institutions and even companies, we aim to enhance the competitiveness of science and technology developed in Portugal. Between 2020 and 2023, the FCT approved 384 advanced computing projects, and the most recent call for proposals set a new record with 140 projects approved.”

Deucalion is co-financed with a total budget of EUR 20 million from EuroHPC JU and FCT. Access to the new machine’s computing resources will be jointly managed by FCT and EuroHPC JU in proportion to their investment. The supercomputer is managed by the Minho Advanced Computing Center (MACC) at Minho University, on the Azurém campus in Guimarães, Portugal.

EuroHPC JU is a legal and funding organization created in 2018 to enable the European Union and the countries participating in EuroHPC to coordinate their efforts and pool their resources with the goal of making Europe a become the world leader in supercomputers.

The mission of EuroHPC JU is to:

• To develop, deploy, scale and maintain in the EU an interconnected and secure ecosystem of supercomputing, quantum computing, services and data infrastructure.
• To support the development and uptake of innovative and competitive quantum computing and supercomputing systems that are demand-driven and user-driven based on the supply chain that will ensure the availability of components , technology and knowledge.
• To extend the use of that quantum computing and supercomputing infrastructure to a large number of public and private users.

To this end, EuroHPC JU is procuring and installing supercomputers across Europe. No matter where they are in Europe, European scientists and users in the public sector and industry can benefit from these EuroHPC supercomputers, which rank among the most powerful. world.

To date, EuroHPC JU has purchased 8 supercomputers:

Deployment of two more supercomputers is underway: JUPITER in Germany, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, and Daedalus in Greece, with larger plans, including a second exascale supercomputer in France and some mid-range supercomputers.

In June 2023, EuroHPC JU also signed hosting agreements with six locations across Europe to host and operate EuroHPC quantum computers: in the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain .

Source: EuroHPC JU