CLOUD

Bahia, Brazil will receive a supercomputing center for innovation in industry that will house the largest supercomputer in Latin America. The project, announced Friday, in Salvador, will be installed in January 2014, at the Center for Integrated Manufacturing and Technology Senai Cimatec Unit, located in Salvador.

The initiative , which will integrate the National System for High Performance Processing, is the result of a partnership between the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI), the National Service of Industrial Learning (Senai), local and state, the National Agency of Petróleo (ANP) and the company BG Brazil, the oil and gas segment.

According to the executive secretary of MCTI , Luiz Antonio Elias , the Supercomputing Center for Industrial Innovation is part of the federal government's strategy in the area of ​​science and technology (S & T) , since it boosts the productive chains with local knowledge.

"For such a proposal to be made it ​​is necessary to stimulate the national laboratories with large human resources training," Elias noted during the launch of the project. "So we are investing R$14 million in this project and over R$14 million in grants to the centers of R&D and another R$ 30 million for the networking system at federal universities and scientific institutions," he said, referring to the announcement within the Greater IT and Ipê Network, which is geared towards the Brazilian education and research community .

The project

The supercomputing center will house two supercomputing nuclei. The first will be a shared laboratory computer modeling for the oil and natural gas, which will feature the largest supercomputer in Latin America. The equipment, to be implemented by BG Group, is able to perform 300 trillion operations per second (TFlops) and will be used primarily in geophysical surveys.

"This supermachine results in a center of excellence in modeling and seismic imaging of international level, contributing to the development of studies in complex fields of petroleum gas, such as the pre-salt," said the president of BG Brazil, Nelson Silva.

The other is the national referral center for high performance supercomputing to serve the industry, focusing on the areas of biomedicine, wind energy, robotics and image processing.

Technology

The supercomputing center will give priority to the study and improvement of Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) technology for the processing of 3D seismic data and 4D industrial dimension, at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN). The University of British Columbia, Canada, and Imperial College London, in England, are the world leaders in FWI and are collaborators in research.

According to the director general of the ANP, Magda Chambriard , the project brings a "major contribution" to society to "completely change" the level of seismic exploration in the country. "The center will allow us to overcome some barriers of exploration, as found in the Paraná Basin, using Brazilian national machinery and intelligence."