Tenerife will have a new supercomputer. I already had two with the names of Teide and of Anagaand they will now be joined by a new and promising project called the Atlantic Supercomputing Center. With it, it is hoped to turn the Canary Islands into a new nerve center for retaining and attracting talent in the technological field.
Up to 10 million euros of investment. This new project It is a collaboration of the Cabildo of Tenerife and the Institute of Technology and Renewable Energies (ITER) with the German technology giant Bechtle. It will have an initial investment of 5.5 million euros, which could rise to 10 million as its four phases are deployed (two for storage, two for computing) oriented by the demand for the center and its resources. The expansion is flexible and Bechtle will supply the latest technology available at the time of project execution to avoid the use of obsolete components.
The fifth supercomputer by power in Spain. By integrating with the existing nodes, the Atlantic Supercomputing Center will achieve a combined power that will place it as the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the entire national territory. It is also expected to enter the prestigious TOP500 list which brings together the most powerful supercomputers from around the world.
Hybrid architecture. The rise of AI has meant that the project has an architecture that will allow working with both more conventional workloads and those intended for projects in the field of artificial intelligence. Thus, its architecture will be hybrid:
- CPU: although it has not been specified which processors it will use, it has been indicated that the supercomputer will have 13 nodes with 288 cores each, which will allow for more than 3,000 process cores to execute scientific tasks, for example.
- GPU: there will also be four specialized nodes with a total of 32 Nvidia H200 NVL cards, which will allow training of large language models and the development of AI projects.
- Performance: this expansion is expected to provide between 1.3 and 1.4 PFLOPS of global computing power (close to 300 TFLOPS in CPU and almost one PFLOP in GPU), indicated those responsible for the Cabildo de Tenerife and ITER.
Hours instead of months. The president of the Cabildo, Rosa Dávila, stood out that local laboratories, the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the University of La Laguna among others will be able to access these resources to be able to compute in hours what previously could take months. Juan José Martínez, from ITER, recalled how during the pandemic the Teide-HPC supercomputer It was one of the five centers in all of Spain who sequenced and monitored the biological variants of COVID-19.
From the audiovisual sector to the aerospace sector. Among the sectors that will benefit from this computing capacity will be those associated with the audiovisual industry. The Teide-HPC infrastructure was for example used to render scenes from the film ‘Tadeo Jones 2: The Secret of King Midas‘. It will also be the core of the project management of canary satellite constellation.
Attracting talent. This facility also wants to become an element that reinforces the role of the Canary Islands as a technological hub. Having a supercomputing infrastructure like this wants to help attract technology companies that promote highly qualified young employment and therefore retain and attract new talent in this sector.
Efficiency. Although the power of Teide HPC will greatly benefit from these new resources, advances in photolithography will mean that the new supercomputer will occupy only a quarter of the previous physical space. Its environmental impact will also be zero: the infrastructure will be located in ITER’s own facilities, and will be powered entirely with clean energy from its wind farms and photovoltaic plants.
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