CÁTEDRA HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
MIRIAN TAVARES AND PEDRO FERRÉ INTEGRATE NEW RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE DEDICATED TO HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
CIAC coordinator Mirian Tavares and CIAC researcher Pedro Ferré are part of the Cátedra High Performance Computing (HPC), led by Miguel Avillez, coordinator of the High Performance Computing Centre – University of Évora (HPC-UÉ), of the Computational Astrophysics Group of the same University and researcher at the Technical University of Berlin. This is a new research and development (R&D) infrastructure of the University of Évora, in partnership with the Universities of the Azores, Algarve, Nova de Lisboa and Porto, dedicated to high performance computing.
The Cátedra High Performance Computing will enable a more efficient approach to national and European digital innovation strategies for academia, business, and other public-private organizations by promoting knowledge transfer between academia/industry and by enhancing the development and adoption of HPC, HPDA, and AI by different stakeholders in the region and at national and international levels.
This new R&D infrastructure counts with the contribution of 24 researchers from the Universities of Evora, Azores, Algarve, Nova de Lisboa and Porto, with expertise in different scientific areas such as supercomputing, data processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer science, data science, computational astrophysics, computational chemistry and biochemistry, computational biophysics, bioinformatics, health, mineral resources and digital humanities. Furthermore, it involves public entities and national and international companies such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise (sponsor of the Cátedra), DECSIS Information System, S.A., Assimagra – Mineral Resources of Portugal, Cluster Portugal Mineral Resources, ANIET – National association of the Extractive and Manufacturing Industry, ACPMR – Cluster Portugal Mineral Resources Association, Geosense, GEOteKnics, Regional Tourism Entity of Alentejo, Colab KiTP – Knowledge to Innovate Professions in Tourism, 3D Business Hub, FastCompChem, HealthTech Lisboa, Stark Data, among others.
The Cátedra HPC comprises the establishment of a structure dedicated to research and development, data storage, management and processing; data collections; the provision of specialized services in HPC, HPDA and AI for local, national and international intervenors; certified training in HPC, HPDA, AI as well as a program to prepare and involve PMEs in the use of these technologies and computational resources.
In parallel, the use of local advanced computing infrastructures managed by the HPC Center – UÉ is enhanced, such as the OBLIVION supercomputer (acquired under the ENGAGE SKA research infrastructure, specifically for processing data from the worldwide Square Kilometre Array project), which is currently being upgraded to double its processing capacity and ten times more data storage capacity; the VISION cluster, dedicated to processing with artificial intelligence using NVIDIA technology, (being the largest cluster in Portugal with this capacity); and the ORION cluster, used in software acceleration with coprocessors.
