GOVERNMENT
University of the Basque Country Acquires Supercomputer
The University of the Basque Country, through the General Services for Research (SGIker) of the Vice-Rector’s Office for Research, recently acquired a supercomputer with the aim of providing their researchers with a first-class tool for the undertaking of international-level, state-of-the art research projects.
The new supercomputer, baptised Arina (“swift”) by the University, has 128 processors which enable 668 GFLOPS, which in turn, enables the carrying out of 680,000 millions mathematical operations per second); it has 264 GygaBites of RAM memory and more than 8 TeraBites of storage, 4 of them HP’s high-speed SFS (Shared File System) installed in Spain for the first time. All this means that this new information tool has become the greatest public computer within the Basque Autonomous Community being, moreover, an infrastructure that is accessible to any researcher or company, by means of the General Service for Information-Applied Research. Moreover, outside the academic timetable, this General Service for Information applied to research employs 80 computers for teaching use in research, thus augmenting the computational power to TeraFLOPS 1.1, i.e. to more than 1 billion mathematical operations per second.
This new information technology infrastructure is in full operation and used by 29 research groups working in different projects such as:
- Study of the toxicity of aluminium and its possible relation with Alzheimer.
- Study of the atmosphere of Jupiter and Saturn.
- Study of new materials for their use in fuel cells.
- Study of bacterian genome.
- Computational intelligence.
- Spectroscope of functionalised nanotubes.
- Fluorescent biomarkers for biology and pharmacology.
- Nanotechnology, study in nanostructures.
- Design of pharmaceutical drugs.
- Molecular study of proteins.
- Anaesthetics.
- Laser colorants
- Ablation by laser.
- Magnetic materials for hard discs.
- Flexible elements in robot design.
- Materials and structures for nanotechnology.
- Theoretical studies in Physics, Chemistry, Biochemistry, Mathematics, and so on.
Overall, the investment in this new installation of 780,000 euros took place in two stages: the first in 2004 of 300,000 euros and the second, more recently, of 480,000 euros. This infrastructure is administered by two doctors, highly qualified and with a wide experience in the area of scientific calculus.
