SYSTEMS

• CESGA positioned the Galician community as one of the leading technological regions in Spain

• When FinisTerrae launched in 2008, it was ranked 100th on the TOP500

• HP Labs hired CESGA and universities in Santiago and A Coruña for 2 major research projects

Today in Santiago de Compostela, HP and Intel held a ceremony to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Supercomputing Center of Galicia. Since its opening two decades ago, CESGA has became important with the introduction of revolutionary technologies and its talented technologists, researchers and users, which now exceed 550, making it an important source of job creation and support for science and research.

HP and Intel begun its journey with the center over 10 years ago, because in 2002 CESGA increased its equipment with Compaq machines, the same year firm was acquired by HP. Since 2008, CESGA FinisTerrae has supercomputer technology powered by HP and Intel, which provides a great computing power. Today, CESGA has an infrastructure able to do 33 trillion calculations per second, generating 27 million hours of computing and storage of more than 2.2 million gigabytes of data. The FinisTerrae supercomputer, at that time the third largest in the world shared memory system, was essential to the implementation and development of many research projects of great magnitude, hardly approachable with other technologies.

Galician knowledge was used by HP Labs, who signed two contracts with CESGA research and the universities of Santiago and A Coruña, amounting to a half million euros. HP Labs also hired CESGA to carry out a research project on the use of "Cloud Computing" applied to education in rural settings. This project, Escolas Cloud, received several international awards. Additionally, HP supported and continues to support, the master in high performance computing provided by universities of Santiago and A Coruña and CESGA.

Value for the Galician economy

During the day, attendees had the opportunity to visit the facilities of the Center, and were attended by Antonio Figueras, vice president of CSIC, José María de la Torre, vice president of HP Enterprise Group for Spain and Portugal, Javier García Tobío, director CESGA; Norberto Mateos, Intel CEO for Southern Europe region and Salustiano Mato, rector of the University of Vigo.

Subsequently, there was a conference-colloquium that addressed the value that the Center has to Galician society, placing the community as one of the premier technology across the country. Thanks to FinisTerrae, CESGA became a world leader in the fields of scientific and technical calculations, promoting from Galicia relations with many research groups internationally.

In this sense, José María de la Torre, vice president of HP Enterprise Group for Spain and Portugal, said: "From HP’s bet on CESGA within our ongoing commitment to innovation, R & D + i and infrastructures research. This commitment was undoubtedly a success that helped boost Galicia as one of the most important regions in the knowledge society globally. "

The Intel CEO Iberia, Norberto Mateos, spoke about new technologies in the coming years to have supercomputers that consume "10% of current energy" while becoming more powerful.

In the words of Javier García Tobío, director of CESGA, "CESGA aims to contribute to the advancement of Science and Technology, through research and the application of computing and high performance communications, and other resources of the information technology, in collaboration with other institutions, for the benefit of the company. This goal is possible to achieve thanks to the team of people from the center and the available infrastructure. Collaboration with HP and Intel has given us this fundamentally.