The government of Mexico announced this Wednesday that it will build a supercomputer that, according to it, will have a processing capacity more than seven times greater than that of the most powerful computer that exists in Latin America.
Named after Coatlicue, a goddess from Mexican mythology who represents the source of power and life, the supercomputer will have a processing capacity of 314 petaFLOPS, the officials responsible for the project reported at a press conference with President Claudia Sheinbaum.
PetaFLOPS is a unit of computational performance that is equivalent to 1,000 trillion calculations per second, a number expressed as 10 to the 15th power.
“We want it to be a public supercomputer, it is a people’s supercomputer,” Sheinbaum said about the project that, he added, will provide Mexico with “a computing capacity that no other country in Latin America has.”
Currently, Brazil has the largest supercomputers in the region, with four devices with between 13.7 and 42 petaFLOPS capacity, followed by Argentina, whose Clementina XXI computer reaches 12.6 petaFLOPS, according to data presented by the Mexican government on both public and private devices.
The title of the most powerful in the world is held by El Capitan, a computer operated by the American national laboratory Lawrence Livermore, whose processing capacity is 1,809 exaFLOPS, according to industry reports consulted by AFP.
The exaFLOPS unit is equivalent to one trillion calculations per second and is expressed as 10 to the 18th power.
The director of Mexico’s Digital Transformation Agency, José Merino, said that the construction of Coatlicue will begin next January and will be carried out in seven stages over 24 months. The project will require a public investment of 6,000 million pesos (326.6 million dollars).
The main uses of the supercomputer will be the resolution of public problems that require high computing capacity, such as climate prediction, planting and harvest planning, and water, oil, and energy projects, he added.
Merino indicated that it will also be used for scientific research, to support entrepreneurial projects and to offer massive computing services to the private sector.