LISBON – The European Commission, along with Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa, has launched a new European supercomputer in Portugal, reported German news agency (dpa).
The high-performance computing system called Deucalion is located at the University of Minho in Guimarães, northern Portugal, the commission announced on Wednesday.
The supercomputer, commissioned by the joint initiative EuroHPC between the European Union, European countries and private partners, has a computing capacity of 10 petaflops and is thus capable of performing one quadrillion calculations per second.
By comparison, the supercomputer calculates several hundred thousand times faster than a standard computer.
Deucalion can be used to advance research and development in a variety of fields, such as meteorology, fluid dynamics and aerodynamics, astrophysics and cosmology, it said.
But it will also promote innovation in areas, such as artificial intelligence, personalised medicine, firefighting and spatial planning, as well as smart mobility and autonomous vehicles, it added.
Deucalion reportedly cost €20 million (US$21.5 million) and is the eighth supercomputer developed by EuroHPC.
Similar high-performance computing systems already exist in Finland (Lumi), Italy (Leonardo), Slovenia (Vega), Luxembourg (MeluXina), Bulgaria (Discoverer), the Czech Republic (Karolina) and Spain (MareNostrum5). Others are set to follow.
The Jülich Research Centre near Aachen in Germany is to house the first exascale computer. Jupiter, as the processor is called, will be the first supercomputer in Europe to break the barrier of one trillion computing operations per second.- Bernama
