Geryon 3: the supercomputer to process astronomical data is already working at the UC Institute of Astrophysics

Regarding Astronomy Day, which was celebrated on March 21, the Center for Astrophysics and Related Technologies (CATA) inaugurated this new supercomputer in the IA facilities, the largest in Chile dedicated to this discipline.

In the facilities of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (IA), on March 21, just for Astronomy Day, the Center for Astrophysics and Related Technologies (CATA) inaugurated Geryon 3, the supercomputer with the largest data processing capacity dedicated to this discipline in the country. This milestone means a qualitative advance for local scientific research, since it significantly improves the computational capacity available until now.

The cost of the equipment was USD $350.000 and its capacity is concentrated in a 36-square-meter room with a technical floor, where it is cooled by a unique refrigeration system. Regarding its composition, it has 12 nodes, each with 64 cores and 512 GB of memory, providing a total of 768 cores, and expanding its potential for information processing by more than 4 times. Its purchase was possible thanks to financing from the National Research and Development Agency (ANID); It will be permanently located in the IA and its administration will be the responsibility of CATA.

The main tasks of Geryon 3 will be to carry out numerical simulations and analyze large image databases, which require a lot of computing power, optimizing project development times, contributing to speed and facilitating scientific work. Its acquisition “significantly increases our computational capacity, which will make it possible, on the one hand, to analyze the enormous amount of data that the new megatelescopes will provide us and, on the other, to carry out more powerful simulations, achieving a deeper understanding of the physical phenomena that take place in the universe,” said Guido Garay, Director of CATA.

In this same line, it will also offer computing services to different initiatives that require processing enormous volumes of data in areas such as mining, renewable energy, biogenetics, forestry engineering, becoming an “active collaborator with cutting-edge technology to develop projects that are linked to the improvement of processes, decision making and beneficial actions for society, with this we solve problems of national interest, and why not, also international to face these doubts and solve them in the shortest possible time,” said Patricia Tissera. , Principal Investigator of CATA and associate professor at the UC Institute of Astrophysics.