The University of Málaga (UMA) has a strong tradition on Supercomputing that goes back to the decade of the 90’s where parallel computers were mainly used for research on parallelization of computation-intensive applications.
It was on 1997 when the first supercomputer was installed, dedicated exclusively to the execution of scientific applications by the UMA researchers. It was called “Picasso”, a SGI Origin 2000 machine that gave an uninterrupted service for 10 years.
Over the years, this supercomputer has been upgraded (to the current configuration with 40,000 cores), while the center has become involved in more topics. For example, the SCBI is one of the founding nodes of the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES – 2006) and is a founder of the Plataforma Andaluza de Bioinformática (PAB – 2007).
Nowadays the supercomputing facilities that gives support to research activities are composed by an heterogeneous set of computing nodes with different characteristics to accommodate any type of computation (nodes with GPUs, with Intel or AMD processors, with up to 2TB of RAM,…).
Supercomputing managers and administrators also advise users on computational or data processing problems, as well as on the optimal use of available hardware and software tools.
