Meet Deucalion: the newest and fastest Portuguese supercomputer

Written By Paula Rodrigues

Photographs: Nuno Gonçalves/GCI/UMinho

"A step forward for Portugal". This is how Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa described the inauguration of the Deucalion supercomputer in Guimarães, addressing a room full of national and European personalities linked to science, technology, and education. The machine, he began, "can do in an hour what a laptop would take 20 years to do," which, translated into exact numbers, is 10 petaflops — or the ability to perform 10 million billion calculations per second.

Elvira Fortunato, Minister of Science, Technology and Higher Education, highlighted the wide range of applications of the new supercomputer: Artificial intelligence, personalized medicine, development of new drugs, discovery of new materials, observatory of the Earth and oceans, and the fight against climate change. This will be made possible by simulations and models that can be carried out by members of the scientific community, companies, and public administrations.

"The data processed here is an opportunity for those working and researching in the field of supercomputing, but also for the rest of the scientific community whose research requires increasing needs for digital information processing, intensive computing, data science, and artificial intelligence, among others", Elvira Fortunato said. 

Prime Minister António Costa also highlighted another added value of Deucalion: the fact that it is connected to the European network of new supercomputers. This connection will allow the exchange of knowledge and thus improve the work of Portuguese scientists with "scientific, economic and added value marriages - essential for internationalization".

Also present were Madalena Alves, President of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT); Josep Maria Martorell of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center; Diana Morant, Spain's Minister of Science and Innovation; Thomas Skordas, Deputy Director General for Communication Networks, Content and Technology at the European Commission (CNECT); and Anders Dam Jensen, Executive Director of the EuroHPC JU.

Deucalion in Numbers:

  • 10 million billion calculations per second

  • 1900 meters of optical fiber

  • 2359 high-speed interconnect cables

  • 26 two-meter cabinets

  • 26 tons

Paula Rodrigues
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