New Acquisitions (Part I)

Euskalmet, the Basque Regional Meteorological Agency has announced today a new 11TF Supercomputer based on IBM iDataPlex technology for its research.

In fact, EJIE, the Basque Government Computing Services is behind this acquisition, which IBM will have to install in 6 months time. It is said that the supercomputer will be used by other research institutions as well.

So this reveals many unknowns regarding the Basque supercomputing policy: first and most important they will use the EJIE infrastructure. This means that EJIE´s datacenter will host it. And EJIE will pay a certain amount to IBM employees to manage the infrastructure.

This is good and bad news: probably EJIE does not have any qualified HPC employee. Therefore no local technicians will benefit from this knowledge as IBM will remain as the manager of the machine: what about the user support - applications team? The public University?

It also shows that the Basque region wants its own supercomputing power to be managed locally rather than doing it in any of the Spanish centers.

In the end I guess it is expected to see a regional center that will look after the small machines spreaded across the Basque region: we only need somebody in the Government to make a deeper research.

In future we will update this post with further information regarding this acquisition. We will also publish further details about other HPC machines in the Basque Region and their users. More to come in short.