SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, June 22 (EUROPE PRESS) –
The Cabildo de Tenerife, through the Technological Institute of Renewable Energies (ITER), has put into operation the Anaga supercomputer, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the country with which Tenerife will make a leap in quality in its offer for the establishment of companies technology on the island.
This equipment constitutes a fundamental part of the ALiX project for the development of infrastructures aimed at creating an industrial fabric around ICT in Tenerife.
The new device will complement and expand the features and speed of the TEIDE HPC, which will go from having a capacity of 260 TFLOPs/s to 1000, thereby multiplying its performance by four.
The Minister for Innovation, Enrique Arriaga, stressed that this supercomputer “is not only at the service of science and research, but can also be used by specialized companies that require large data storage and analysis speed”, and added that with the objective set fundamentally for the audiovisual sector and the development of artificial intelligence.
Arriaga added that ITER and the Cabildo itself are already holding meetings with universities, reference centers and large companies to make use of these facilities. “The supercomputer is a key piece of the Innovation Master Plan, the backbone for creating a favorable ecosystem on our island for the implementation and creation of innovative companies that will work on three fundamental lines: the audiovisual and video game sectors, renewable energy and technology” , said.
This morning the first vice president of the Cabildo visited, together with the CEO of ITER, Elena Rodríguez, the coordinator of the Engineering Area, Jesús Rodríguez Álamo; and the representative of LENOVO, Noam Rosen, the installations of this new equipment that is located in the facilities of the D-ALiX Data Processing Center, where terrestrial and submarine communication networks converge, and which provides hosting services for ICT equipment to Canarian companies and institutions, with a high level of availability and connectivity.
Noam Rosen explained that for Lenovo it is a great opportunity to work hand in hand with ITER and that there are many possibilities to continue collaborating on other projects, and stated that “they are entities that are committed to sustainability, innovation and research. He added that “Lenovo is highly committed to promoting research in different fields and advancing the development of humanity.”
Meanwhile, Jesús Álamo assured “that today a further step has been taken in the work carried out by ITER for ten years in supercomputing to support different centers and companies that otherwise would not have the capacity or speed to work, investigate, store or cross data, which otherwise they would only find in remote places and at a much higher cost.
In this case, Álamo details, “there is a commitment to technology that uses computer graphics cards and that allows many calculations to be made simultaneously on topics such as virtual reality, augmented reality and, above all, artificial intelligence, which until now were not possible. could be done with TEIDE”.
These types of systems have promoted a revolution worldwide, being the basis of most of the new developments in Artificial Intelligence. This computational capacity allows the optimization of other types of computation, in different fields of scientific utility and is directly useful in the development of virtual and augmented reality applications, which also constitutes a field of great potential with the emergence of initiatives such as the metaverse.
The equipment consists of 16 nodes, in which each of them has 4 GPU cards, plus another additional node with 8 GPUs, to these are added 4 additional nodes with 1 GPU. This entire set of nodes is interconnected through very high-bandwidth Ethernet and Infiniband networks, allowing not only to perform parallel computations, but also full and high-capacity integration with the computing and storage systems already available as part of TEIDE HPC.
The supercomputer has been acquired thanks to a grant from the Ministry of Science and Innovation, within the 2019 Scientific Infrastructure program. The total investment in the equipment is around 793,427 euros, with 85% financing from the Ministry of Science and Innovation.
