Oblivion@SKA supercomputer inaugurated in Portugal

In February, the Portuguese ENGAGE SKA research consortium inaugurated the Oblivion@SKA supercomputer in Evora in the south of the country. With its 239 TeraFLOPS capacity and 1.5 PB of storage, the supercomputer is currently one of the best in the country.

“It is a powerful machine, with computing, management and storage nodes, and a performance equivalent to 1,200 personal computers working together,” said the astrophysicist and coordinator of Oblivion Miguel Avillez.

Oblivion@SKA represents a milestone in the development of digital applications for astronomy, data science and other applications with high socio-economic impact, being part of the National Network for Advanced Computing.

It was installed to support the ENGAGE SKA research infrastructure and the Portuguese scientific community, enabling the parallel processing of massive volumes of data resulting from the various research and innovation activities developed in Portugal and within the scope of design, prototyping and operation of the SKA and its precursors. Fifty percent of its compute time will also be open to society and will contribute to Smartcities studies, simulations of fire monitoring and recovery, precision agriculture, smart factories or various infrastructures, design of new materials, medical drugs, or modelling of quantum communications and computing.

“We are empowering the country and the industry, through a consortium with four million euros,” underlines Domingos Barbosa, ENGAGE SKA consortium coordinator. The consortium is composed of the Telecommunications Institute, University of Aveiro, University of Porto, University of Coimbra, University of Évora, Polytechnic Institute of Beja and Associação RAEGE Açores.

Olbivion@SKA

Credit: ENGAGE SKA

By Sonia Anton (University of Aveiro)