DEUCALION
A supercomputer co-funded by the FCT and EuroHPC, installed on the Azurém campus of the University of Minho. It is a national collaborative infrastructure to promote and support Open Science initiatives in supercomputing, data science, and visualization. It aims to be a sustainable computing and data infrastructure, aimed at national scientific and industrial communities, and also collaborates with international partners. Deucalion currently ranks 99th in energy efficiency within the Arm partition and 257th in processing speed within the TOP500 list – November 2024.
This computing infrastructure is part of the RNCA – National Advanced Computing Network – and offers High Performance Computing (HPC) resources with and without GPUs (Graphics processing unit) – to be used by the research, technology and innovation/industry communities.
Contact: deucalion@support.macc.fccn.pt
The acquisition and operation of the EuroHPC supercomputers Deucalion and MareNostrum 5 are jointly financed by the EuroHPC Initiative, through the European Union's Connecting Europe Facility and the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, as well as by the participating states Portugal and Spain for Deucalion and Spain, Portugal, Croatia and Türkiye for MareNostrum 5.
The Deucalion is managed by FCT, through the FCCN digital services unit, with operational support from the National Center for Advanced Computing (CNCA). The national part is co-financed by Investment RE-C05-i08 “More Digital Science” of the Recovery and Resilience Plan – PRR.
More about financing DEUCALION PROJECT
Operational from 2024
Specifications published on the EuroHPC website
One of the first 5 Petascale supercomputers co-funded by EuroHPC
Fujitsu PRIMEHPC A64FX (ARM partition) and Atos Bull Sequana AMD EPYC (x86 partition)
33 nodes with NVidia Ampere GPUs
Storage with 430 TB High-speed NVMe partition and 10.6 PB high-speed based Parallel File System partition
10 PFlop of maximum processing capacity
Partitions
Deucalion provides users with 3 partitions:
ARM
The ARM partition on Deucalion refers to the area of the supercomputer that uses processors based on the ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) architecture, known for its energy efficiency and performance. This ARM partition is used to execute tasks that benefit from these characteristics, such as scientific simulations and large-scale data processing.
The ARM architecture is based on a reduced instruction set (RISC), which allows for a simpler and more efficient design, resulting in lower power consumption and heat generation.
X86
The X86 partition in Deucalion uses processors based on the x86 architecture, originally developed by Intel and widely adopted in PCs, servers, and supercomputers.
It is based on a complex instruction set (CISC), which offers a wide range of functionality and support for a wide variety of software and applications.
The x86 partition is used to run tasks that require high compatibility with existing software and benefit from the robust performance offered by these processors. It is ideal for applications that require high processing power and access to a vast ecosystem of development and optimization tools.
GPU
Deucalion's GPU partition is composed of 33 x86-based nodes equipped with advanced Graphics Processing Units – GPUs – for optimizing parallel calculations and computationally intensive tasks.
Of these 33 nodes, 17 are equipped with NVIDIA A100 GPUs with 40GB of RAM, while the remaining 16 nodes have NVIDIA A100 GPUs with 80GB of RAM. A100 GPUs are known for their ability to deliver exceptional performance in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and scientific computing applications, due to their highly parallel and efficient architecture.
Software
Using a combination of Linux operating systems optimized for HPC (high performance computing), Deucalion provides a robust and scalable environment for running intensive tasks.
Storage & Network
The storage system is designed to provide high capacity and speed, ensuring efficient and fast access to the large volumes of data required for scientific and industrial computing. Deucalion's network infrastructure utilizes cutting-edge technologies, such as InfiniBand, to deliver low latency and high bandwidth.
Architecture of Deucalion
Access
Advanced Computing Project Competitions
RNCA organizes competitions for Advanced Computing Projects with the aim of allocating computational resources for research and innovation.
EuroHPC
Access to the EuroHPC portion of Deucalion is governed by the Access Policy of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. Information about Access can be found on the page dedicated to EuroHPC Access Competitions.
Access Commercial
For computer projects that do not qualify for national competitions, it is possible to submit an access request, the associated costs of which are calculated after the request has been analyzed.