The National Weather Service incorporated a supercomputer that expand its capabilities for forecasting and meteorological models, and that, in addition, it will be available for the investigations of the rest of the national scientific system.
The new supercomputer, with a cost of 675 million pesos, is financed with contributions from the Ministries of Science; while the adequacy of the physical space of the National Meteorological Service to house the team, will have a contribution from the Ministry of Defense for some 250 million pesos.
The national scientific portfolio reported in a statement that this new equipment provides competitive calculation services at regional level and it is indispensable in the preparation of meteorological forecasts; the modeling of complex systems; genomic studies; drug design; the development of new materials; industrial design; modeling of oil and gas basins; the development of artificial intelligence; and data science.
The equipment to be installed is based on GPU processors (graphics processing unit) and CPU (central processing unit) that could reach processing speeds of at least 400 TFLOP/s on CPUs, and 2000 TFLOP/s on GPUs, putting it close to the fastest computers in the world .
This type of technology alsoIt will allow in the future to expand the calculation capacity by adding CPUs and GPUs without the need to modify the base structure.
We continue to improve our scientific and technological capabilities in Defense.
ministries @MindefArg Y @ciencia_ar we come together to finance the acquisition of a supercomputer that will be installed in the @SMN_Argentina and can be used by the entire scientific community. https://t.co/UISpV9kVho
– Jorge Taiana (@JorgeTaiana) August 17, 2022
The Ministry of Defense stated that this unique supercomputer in Latin America It will be installed in the Data Center of the National Meteorological Service (SMN) and its use will be open to the entire scientific and technological community of the country.
From the signing of an agreement between both ministries, in which the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and the National Meteorological Service (SMN) participate, the National Supercomputing Center will be createdwhich will become the head of the network of centers of the National High Performance Computing System (SNCAD).
These actions fall within the Strategic Plan for High Performance Computing in Argentina: 2019-2024, which seeks to benefit the entire National System of Science, Technology and Innovation; to the productive sector and, particularly, to the National Meteorological Service.
Following the planned steps, this afternoon Ministers Jorge Taiana and Daniel Filmus announced the call for bids to acquire high-performance computing equipment.
About, Taiana He stated that “this supercomputer will be an element for multiplying knowledge that will be at the service of the country’s scientific organizations.”
“We are proud of the scientific and technical area of the Ministry of Defense. It is an area that has been badly abused many times and is now on the mend. It is above all an area that does research, and that strengthens the link with defense production”, assured the Minister of Defense.
“We are recreating a whole network of institutions related to scientific research and, in turn, to defense production. That is why the important thing is to achieve a synergy within the State institutions, but that they can also include the private company, especially the small and medium-sized technology companies”, said Minister Taiana.
While Filmus expressed: “It is important to make this announcement on a day like today, August 17, and to think that while in another era sovereignty was settled with sabers, today this is achieved through science and technology. This is the best tribute we can pay to San Martín, taking this huge step forward in science and technology”.
In addition, he reaffirmed the importance of “counting State policies”, and stated: “When they talk to me about supercomputing, I automatically remember Clementina, the origins of computing in Argentina. These types of joint initiatives are strategic, and we are proud to carry out the Inter-institutional Council for Science and Technology, which brings together the agencies of the National Scientific and Technological System and which is not just the Ministry of Science”.
For its part, the director of the National Meteorological Service, Celeste Saulo, stressed: “In principle, this supercomputer will be at the service of the entire scientific-technological sector, and the important thing about this is that it will allow the country’s capacity to be increased in general, and the SMN in particular, to do science, to carry out numerical experiments that in our case are very computationally expensive and that we cannot carry out today with the computer system that we have because ours is dedicated exclusively to the execution of the weather forecast system. contingency system in case we had a problem with the operating system”.
“The most important thing I would like to highlight is this joint initiative between the Ministry of Science and Defensewhich really understands that there is no sector of the country that can develop without leveraging science, both from the Ministry of Defense and from other areas of the Government, and it is important to understand that science is the basis of development”, concluded Saulo.
