University of Évora to inaugurate the Oblivion supercomputer

Acquired to support the processing of massive volumes of data, in the order of Petabytes (millions of Gigabytes), the Oblivion Supercomputer will be opened this Tuesday, February 4th at the University of vora, at 11:30 am. The machine will support several research and innovation activities to be developed in Portugal, within the scope of the design, prototyping and operation of the SKA (Square Kilometer Array) radio telescope and its possible precursors, the university said in a statement, stressing that these activities will occupy 50% of the machine's capacity.

The remaining half of the computer's resources will be used by the scientific community and companies under the National Network for Advanced Computing. The machine, which will be operational 24/7, is capable of processing 239 million operations per second (TFLOPS) with a relatively low energy cost, referred to.

Exemplifying the capabilities of the supercomputer, it can run several parallel applications, in different scenarios of science and innovation, helping to monitor and recover from fires, make predictions of climatic developments, optimize the use of public transport and traffic, improvements in efficiency in the energy supply, manage smart factories and precision agriculture.

The computer was designed in partnership between Informantem and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, consisting of computing, management and storage nodes. It also has three internal communication networks, one of which is infiniband computing and two management networks.

OEngage SKA is a consortium of seven Portuguese institutions led by the Instituto de Telecomunicaes de Aveiro, integrating the Universities of vora, Aveiro, Porto and Coimbra, the Instituto Politcnico de Beja and the RAEGE Aores Association. It is referred to as the interface of the national scientific community to SKA, being a global project involving scientists and engineers from more than 100 institutions located in 21 countries. The objective is to prepare for the construction of the largest radio telescope in the world.

The project had a global financing of around 4 million Euros, awarded by the Foundation for Science and Technology through the COMPETE 2020 Program.