Empowering science and innovation in Portugal
The 2024 edition of the TOP500 brings exciting news. The Deucalion supercomputer, inaugurated in September last year, is ranked for the first time, marking the debut of a Portuguese infrastructure in this distinction – with position #80 in energy efficiency of the Arm partition and #219 in processing speed. The TOP500 was announced at ISC 2024, which took place in Hamburg, Germany.
This achievement is a milestone in the Portuguese scientific and technological landscape. Through this fully sustainable infrastructure, researchers and companies can boost national innovation like never before. The range of areas that can benefit from Deucalion is vast: meteorology and climate modelling, fluid dynamics and aerodynamics, astrophysics and cosmology.
Consequently, its use could have consequences for energy efficiency, artificial intelligence, personalised medicine, pharmaceutical/medicine design and new materials, firefighting, territorial planning, but also smart mobility and autonomous vehicles.
“This acknowledgement of Deucalion reinforces our commitment and investment in Advanced Computing, and the development of supercomputers that achieve notable performance and efficiency at an international level. We will keep up with our efforts, towards the improvement of Portuguese technologies and projects in this domain”. Francisco dos Santos, vice-president of FCT
About Deucalion
The Deucalion is equipped with 2 clusters with 3 partitions. The ARM cluster has 1632 nodes with Fujitsu ARM A64FX processors, and the X86 cluster has 500 nodes with AMD EPYC processors plus, an accelerated partition with 33 nodes, each with NVidia Ampere GPUs. The storage has a total of 10.6 PB Parallel File System partition with a 430 TB High-speed NVMe.
Deucalion also prominently features the Green500 ranking, a list in which supercomputers are ranked according to their energy consumption. Thanks to energy efficient ARM CPUs, this machine is ranked #80.
