Seven months after Brazil’s National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (LNCC) began upgrading its Santos Dumont supercomputer, the work has been completed.

According to Eviden, the supercomputing unit of French IT services provider Atos, which provided the hardware for the upgrade, the system now has additional AI-dedicated capabilities and offers 18.85 petaflops of compute performance.

This is the second upgrade the system has undergone, and its new compute power represents an increase of approximately 575 percent compared to the supercomputer’s original 2015 specification. Santos Dumont launched in 2015 with 1.1 petaflops of performance, and an expansion in 2019 added 1.85 petaflops, based on the Sequana X1000 architecture.

The upgrade consists of five different partitions, with the largest comprising 62 BullSequana XH3145-H blades, each equipped with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and four NVLink-connected Nvidia H100 GPUs. The second largest is based on 20 BullSequana XH3420 blades, with each of its 60 nodes equipped with two AMD Epyc 9684X processors.

The third partition consists of 36 BullSequana XH3515-H blades equipped with four NVLink-connected Nvidia Grace Hopper Superchips, while the fourth includes six blades and 18 nodes, each containing two AMD Instinct MI300A APUs. Finally, there are four nodes equipped with the newest Nvidia Grace Superchip, with all the nodes interconnected by an Nvidia Infiniband NDR non-blocking fabric running at 400Gbps.

The Direct Liquid Cooling system used to cool the upgraded supercomputer now captures more than 98.5 percent of the heat from power supplies, processors, accelerators, network devices, disks, and memory, compared to the 2015 version, which could dissipate only 80 percent of the heat on water.

“Computing and AI technologies are the cornerstone of any scientific and innovation breakthroughs, enabling researchers to tackle humanity’s biggest challenges,” said Luis Casuscelli, head of HPC in South America for Eviden, Atos Group. “Leading and supporting this new extension is a tremendous pride for the Eviden team, giving LNCC’s researchers more computing power, and additional AI-dedicated capabilities while continuously improving the energy efficiency of the supercomputer.

“With our decade-long collaboration with LNCC, taking part in the Brazilian Artificial Intelligence Plan is another proof of Eviden’s commitment to the Franco-Brazilian cooperation and a reminder of the Group’s leading position in the country.”

The update forms part of the Brazilian Artificial Intelligence Plan (PBIA), a $4 billion government-funded plan to develop and deploy artificial intelligence in Brazil between 2024–2028. At its new capacity, Santos Dumont is the fastest supercomputer in Latin America dedicated to scientific research, and should be placed back on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.