Argentina is in the top 100 supercomputers: Clementina XXI was launched

With the help of Clementina XXI, the new supercomputer launched this Wednesday at the Computing Center of the National Meteorological Service (SMN), Argentina for the first time has a foot in the ranking of the 100 most powerful computers in the world and consolidates itself as vanguard of South America, as explained by ministers Jorge Taiana (Defense) and Daniel Filmus (Science, Technology and Innovation) at the obligatory event. A supercomputer is a computer with calculation capabilities much higher than common ones, which is also oriented toward specific purposes. Most supercomputers are made up of less powerful units but working together with a common goal, increasing both the power of the set and its performance. The unit of measurement usually used to express the computing power of a supercomputer is "FLOPs", the acronym in English for "Floating Point Operations Per Second". Named in honor of simply "Clementina", the first supercomputer of the Argentine scientific system that operated between 1961 and 1971, the new version has a computing capacity of 15.4 petaFLOPs and will be shared and open use for researchers and research institutions. the whole country. To graph the power of Clementina XXI, the director of the National Meteorological Service explained that "a latest generation cell phone more or less has a computing capacity of one teraflop", but since 1000 teraFLOPs are needed to have one petaFLOP, "this computer that behind me is equivalent to having 15,000 cell phones operating exactly in sync and with the same objective. With this computing power that is forty times greater than the most powerful computer installed to date in Argentina - the Huayra Muyu used by the SMN to make its operational forecast and with a calculation capacity of 0.37 petaFLOP -, Clementina XXI is in the 82nd place in the TOP 500 supercomputers, a world reference list and biannual update using the "Linpack" benchmark performance test.

• 03/10/2023 • 07:48