The Council of Tenerifethrough the Technological Institute of Renewable Energies (ITER)has launched the Anaga Supercomputer, one of the supercomputers strongest in the country With which Tenerife will give a quality jump in its offer for the implementation of technology companies 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 the TIC 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 part of the Master Plan for Innovation, the backbone for creating a favorable ecosystem on our island for implementation and creation of innovative companies which will work on three fundamental lines audiovisual and video game sector, renewable energies 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 it is a great opportunity for Lenovo to work hand in hand with ITER and that there are many possibilities to continue collaborating on other projects, and stated that “these are entities that are committed to the sustainability, innovation and research. To which he added that “Lenovo has a great commitment to promote research in different fields and advance 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, “a commitment is made 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. what 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 computing capacity allows optimizing other types of computing, 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 nodesin which each of them has 4 GPU cardsplus another additional node with 8 GPUs, To these are added 4 additional nodes of 1 GPU. All this set of nodes is interconnected through Ethernet and Infiniband networks of very high bandwidth, allowing not only that they can perform computations in parallel, but also a total and high-capacity integration with the computation 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 Innovationinside of the 2019 Scientific Infrastructure program. The total investment in the equipment is around €793,427with a 85% financing of the Ministry of Science and Innovation.
