Spain’s University of Málaga (UMA) has secured €10 million ($11.4m) to upgrade the Picasso supercomputer, a high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure that serves researchers throughout Spain via the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES).

This investment will enable the replacement of the current system with a new platform offering greater processing power, storage capacity, and energy efficiency, tailored to the growing needs of fields such as artificial intelligence, scientific simulation, and big data analysis.

The funding comes from the Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities and is part of the national strategy to strengthen supercomputing and artificial intelligence capabilities, amid growing demand for HPC resources from universities, research centers, and companies.

Operational for more than a decade, Picasso is one of the nodes of the Spanish Supercomputing Network and provides computing capacity for scientific projects in fields such as bioinformatics, physics, engineering, materials science, and artificial intelligence.

The upgrade will allow for the incorporation of a new generation of hardware capable of handling increasingly intensive workloads, particularly those related to AI model training and accelerated computing.

In addition to increased performance, the new system will improve the infrastructure’s energy efficiency—an increasingly important consideration in the design of high-capacity HPC platforms.

This investment further adds to Andalusia’s computing capacity. In recent weeks, it has also been announced that the University of Granada will expand its HPC infrastructure with two new supercomputers dedicated to research and artificial intelligence, further strengthening the region’s available processing capacity.

This piece was automatically translated from DCD’s Spanish site and edited by a member of DCD staff.