Spain will have a new supercomputer as from the month of May. The
State Meteorology Agency (AEMET) is developing
‘Cirrus’, which will be the second most powerful supercomputer in the country, behind only MareNostrum, at the Barcelona National Supercomputing Center, and will replace the current one used by the institution at the Data Processing Centre in Madrid.
This supercomputer will be the new nerve centre and data base of AEMET. As well as making weather forecasts thanks to the use of prediction models, all the climate information for the last 125 years will be stored there. These historical series allow the necessary information to be obtained to make new models and use them for the climate services which they seek to develop. In other words, big data on climate that allow Spain’s climate over the last century to be studied in order to make future projections and simulations.
Thanks to the tremendous calculation potential of the new supercomputer, cutting-edge numeric weather forecast models will be executed much quicker, which are essential for providing critical services such as warnings of adverse meteorological phenomena for air navigation and defence services, among others, as well as new climate services and early warning services established in the National Climate Change Adaptation Plan (Spanish acronym: PNACC).
The new AEMET supercomputer will provide almost ten times more computing capacity than the current one installed in 2014 by the French consultancy firm Atos - the company commissioned with its installation. The new installation will have two clusters equipped with more than 50,000 cores based on AMD EPYC processor technologies, with a gross storage capacity of 5.9 PB, connected by a low latency Infiniband network of 200 Gbits per second.
Cutting-edge technology at AEMET
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the Fourth Vice-President of the Government and Minister for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, Teresa Ribera, saw first-hand the ‘Cirrus’ supercomputer, together with the President of AEMET, Miguel Ángel López. There they visited the Data Processing Centre, which ‘Cirrus’ will form part of, on which professionals work in shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to monitor and supervise AEMET’s critical processes, which are the basis for the information offered on the web page and institutional apps of AEMET. In fact, this web page is one of the most visited of all the Spanish public authorities. During the adverse weather episode caused by Storm Filomena, the AEMET institutional web page hit an all-time high in the number of pages visited of 33,427,524 on 8 January 2021.
For its part, the National Forecast Centre – the central unit of the National Forecast System (Spanish acronym: SNP) - prepares the meteorological briefing on the coordination and integrated analysis of the weather situation with the participation of all the units that make up the SNP.
This protocol constitutes the starting point for the production processes of the forecasts, surveillance and the issue of adverse meteorological phenomena, which are operationally sent to the civil protection authorities, AENA and ENAIRE, among others.
This whole operation is based on an infrastructure of different observation networks, which it will be possible to renew thanks to the Next Generation EU Funds.
Spanish Supercomputing Network
BSC's MareNostrum is Spain's most powerful supercomputer
When it operational, ‘Cirrus’ will join the other supercomputers operational in Spain. The
Spanish Supercomputing Network (Spanish acronym: RES), set up in 2007, is the
specific scientific and technical infrastructure (Spanish acronym: ICTS) that
connects 14 supercomputers from around Spain with the aim of offering the necessary supercomputing resources to develop high quality and
innovative scientific and technological projects. This is coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) – the benchmark in supercomputing in the Mediterranean.
This network is made up of MareNostrum and MinoTauro at the National Supercomputing Center; FinisTerrae II at the Supercomputing Centre of Galicia; LaPalma, at the Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute (Spanish acronym: IAC); Altamira, at the Physics Institute of Cantabria (Spanish acronym: IFCA) of the University of Cantabria; Picasso, at the University of Malaga; Tirant, at the University of Valencia; Caesar Augusta, at the Bio-computing and Physics of Complex Systems Institute (Spanish acronym: BIFI) of the University of Zaragoza; Caléndula, at the Supercomputing Centre Foundation of Castile and Leon (Spanish acronym: SCAYLE); Pirineus, at the Consortium of University Services of Catalonia (Spanish acronym: CSUC); LUSITANIA at CénitS (COMPUTAEX Foundation); Cibeles, at the Autonomous University of Madrid; and Urederra, at Services and Technologies of Navarre (Spanish acronym: NASERTIC).
All of these resources of the network are allocated to science and research projects, and their access can be requested by university research groups and public centres that carry on their activity in Spain, the proposals of which are evaluated by an Access Committee.
Outside this network, the former Atlante - from the Instituto Tecnológico de Canarias of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria - and, especially, the Teide-HPC - from the D-ALiX data centre in Tenerife -, currently the second most powerful supercomputer in Spain, also stand out.