Instituto de energía solar

The Universidad Politécnica de Madrid now houses the most powerful supercomputer in Spain, according to the latest Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The system will be used to expand research in a variety of scientific areas, from basic sciences to advanced industrial design.

The supercomputer, called Magerit, is based on the IBM POWER7 architecture and is capable of theoretical peak performance of 103.4 Teraflops, or trillions of floating point calculations per second, and a sustained performance of 72.03 Teraflops, making it the most powerful supercomputer in Spain.

With Magerit, UPM substantially increases its computing power in order to respond to growing demandby the scientific community while also reducing power consumption.

Juan Antonio Zufiria, Country General Manager of IBM Spain, Portugal, Greece and Israel, says, “the major developments in the field of science are linked to modeling and simulation, areas that require considerable computing power. Therefore, the scientific progress of a country is closely related to its ability to invest in supercomputing. IBM is proud to contribute to the scientific and social progress of Spain with our technology.”

This agreement is a collaboration between enterprises and the University to contribute to the research and development of different scientific areas. In this sense, Javier Uceda, Chancelor of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, says “supercomputing is a strategic area for technical and scientific development. It is crucial for the advancement of knowledge and plays a role comparable to what was once the microscope or the telescope. It expands the frontiers of knowledge and becomes a key tool for improving the industrial competitiveness of Spain. At UPM, through the Center for Supercomputing and Visualization of Madrid (CeSViMa), we're betting on this technology to enhance the scientific and technological level of our university.”

The Magerit supercomputer has been installed at CeSViMa, attached to the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and located at the Campus Montegancedo, recently awarded the Campus of International Excellence recognition by the Spanish Government.

The new supercomputer will allow the Centre to:

• Expand support for research and development in Spain through its participation in the Spanish Supercomputing Research Network.
• Increase the participation in research projects of CeSViMa and UPM staff.
• Encourage the production of knowledge, attracting and developing talent, increasing the range of studies available to UPM students.
• Reduce overall power consumption while operating with less space.

Magerit is a cluster system of 245 IBM BladeCenter PS702 nodes with 2 IBM POWER7 processors, 8 cores each, and 7,84 TBytes RAM memory for a total of 3920 cores. The nodes are connected by a a high speed, quadruple rate Infiniband network together with other two networks for filesystem  and management purposes.