A public investment of 5.8 million euros will place the Tenerife supercomputer Teide among the most powerful in Spain and the 100 most powerful in the world. It is announced by the Cabildo of Tenerife on the tenth anniversary of the launch of this megacomputer, managed by the Institute of Technology and Renewable Energy (ITER) at its facilities in Granadilla de Abona, which has given a decisive leap in quality to the Island in multiple research related to innovation, science and technology.
The new island government, chaired by Rosa Davila (DC), has decided to shorten the terms of this financing and will go from four years to two, so that the new Teide will be completed or on track in 2025. This supercomputer has been used in these ten years in multiple projects, both public and private, national and international scope: from weather prediction and genome sequencing (complete set of DNA of an organism, mainly human) to the making of short and feature-length films, epidemic surveillance, analysis of seismic and volcanic information or observation of the universe, including tracking asteroids that could threaten the Earth.
The age, the expiration of the licenses of some of its devices and the inevitable deterioration due to the time that has passed since its installation in 2013 have caused the degree of usefulness of the infrastructure to decrease due to the difficulties in obtaining replacement of some of its components. and, therefore, the quality of the service it provides has also been reduced.
serious limitations
In particular, the storage capacity of the TeideHPC, its technical name, imposes serious limitations on the amount of information that can be processed, stored and transferred and that is continuously generated by platforms such as the sequencing of the ITER Genomics Area, one of its most important users due to the amount of access, file usage and computing needs required.
For these reasons, the insular Corporation has decided to shorten the deadlines for economic items and computer work to bring this machine up to the new demands. One of the main objectives is to increase the total storage capacity to reach 7 petabytes (PB). A petabyte is equivalent to one million gigabytes or, to make it easier to understand, what more than 13 years of high-quality television takes up. The Teide It will have the capacity to process and store more than 50,000 million photographs.
The insular Department of Innovation, Research and Development, led by Juan José Martínez, will be in charge of carrying out the complete update of the most powerful computer in Canary Islands. “The renovation plan is very ambitious because we are talking about a vital instrument for research and development in Tenerife, for the generation of added value and, ultimately, economic diversification,” underlines the councilor of the Cabildo, who recalls that this project It has had “the determined impulse” of the island president, Rosa Dávila.
Improving the computer also involves renewing the technical support of the hardware (physical or material elements that constitute a computer or a computer system) and software (the computer programs that make it possible to execute specific tasks within a computer). It will result in updated equipment that allows the execution of the latest versions of the tools to obtain the highest possible performance. And finally, it will also provide Teide with a high-performance storage system that speeds up all processes.
Since its commissioning a decade ago, the Teide supercomputer has provided service to cover ITER’s own computing needs, such as the storage of information generated in the Genomics Area and the entire seismic network maintained by the Canary Islands Volcanological Institute ( Involcan) in the Archipelago.
But it also provides coverage to other public and private institutions, such as the Institute of Natural Products and Agrobiology of the Higher Council for Scientific Research, the General Research Support Service of the University of La Laguna and the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), either through the signing of various collaboration agreements or through the provision of storage and computing services.
The audiovisual sector
Likewise, the infrastructure has been of vital importance for the development of the audiovisual sector in Tenerife, becoming a fundamental piece in the production of multiple animated films, among which two that were awarded the Goya for best animated film, Tadeo Jones 2, stand out. The Secret of King Midas and Catch the Flag, and another nominee for this award, Ozzy. The audiovisual sector has become one of the strategic sectors for the Island, allowing companies to carry out the entire production process (filming, editing, post-production) in Tenerife, taking advantage of the tax incentives available and the giant Teide, almost as enormous as the volcano.
