On 7 July, LifeWatch ERIC CTO and other ICT staff members visited the Hercules Supercomputer-HPC premises hosted by the CICA – Centro Informático Científico de Andalucía (Andalusian Scientific Computer Centre)–, as one of the main facilities involved in the LifeWatch ERIC AstarteWatch network. The equipment, which is located in Seville at the aforementioned centre, has a RAM of 47.5 terabytes (47,500 GB), a capacity of 1,000 TB (1 PB) and a power of calculation that is estimated at 855 teraflops, equivalent to 855 billion floating point operations per second (FLOPS), which is the parameter used to measure the effiency of this type of machine. That could be likened to nearly 4,000 mid-range PCs working at the same time!
In addition, it is made up of 232 computing nodes with 11,136 last generation processing cores. This equipment will improve the capability of the current supercomputer that CICA has by over 99%, whose characteristics are concentrated in 64 calculation nodes with 656 cores and a performance of 6.2 teraflops and 18 TB of storage.
This will considerably improve LifeWatch ERIC’s HPC capacity, in adherence with both EOSC and EuroHPC requirements.