What is HYPERION, the new supercomputer in Euskadi and the third most powerful in the State, for?

It is maintained by a team of 9 people at the Donostia International Physics Center in San Sebastián and provides services to 500 researchers.

HYPERION has become the third most powerful supercomputer in the State. The other two are located in Catalonia and Galicia and the third is at the facilities of the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) in San Sebastián. It currently serves 500 researchers who benefit from the speed and memory of this supercomputer to advance their research.

What is a supercomputer and what is it used for? The director of the DIPC Supercomputing Center, Txomin Romero, explains to us that a supercomputer is a set of servers connected "all to each other" using a "low latency" network that allows the different servers of the supercomputer to exchange information and work seamlessly. coordinated to solve the problem. That network in HYPERION, with 200 Gigabits per second information transmission speed, is twice as fast as the ATLAS supercomputer, its predecessor, which dates back to 2018.

It has 14,000 cores and 150 TB of RAM but the goal is to reach 30,000 cores and 300 TB, which would make it the second supercomputer in power, only behind the Mare Nostrum in Barcelona. The FRONTIER supercomputer is the most powerful in the world, with 9 million cores, but HYPERION, "is of a very reasonable average size," according to Romero.

The director of the DIPC Supercomputing Center explains to us that HYPERION, in Greek, is the God of Wisdom and Observation, the one who showed the existence of the Sun and the Moon. It has more modern processors, with more cores, a faster clock frequency and more RAM.

The supercomputer is already used, among other projects, to simulate the formation of galaxies, the behavior of new materials, developments in quantum technologies, artificial intelligence or computational chemistry. These supercomputers facilitate the work of researchers because they are capable of breaking down a large problem into several small, manageable ones. The results are then combined to find the final solution in less time.

HYPERION is maintained by a team of 9 people made up of the director of the Supercomputing Center and 6 Computer Engineers, 1 Physicist and 1 Doctor in Chemistry. Cooling is "key and the most complicated" in a supercomputer. In this case it is based on a "refrigerated rear doors" system, which consists of cooling the hot air right where it is produced, which makes it cool in the most effective way and withstands breakdowns much better.