Petrobras started the operations of the Pegasus🇧🇷 supercomputer equipped with 2,016 Nvidia A100 GPUs and has 233,856 cores — powered by 7,308 AMD Epyc 7513 chips. With 21 petaflops, the Pegasus, a machine for high performance computing (HPC in English) takes the title of most powerful supercomputer in Latin America from Dragão, another Petrobras superPC.
Now, the Brazilian state-owned company has four HPC equipment, operating with a total capacity of 63 petaflops, a unit used to measure the performance of computers. Assembled by the company Atos, the supercomputer was acquired through Law 13,303, known as the state law.
30 tons of PC and 678 TB of RAM
With a performance equivalent to 150,000 notebooks working together, the size of Pegasus is also impressive. The entire structure of the supercomputer weighs 30 tons. If all its racks were placed in a row, Pegasus would measure 35 meters in length — an Airbus A320 is just over 37 meters in length.
In terms of memory, Pegasus has 678 TB of RAM (insert a lot of jokes about Chrome and other programs here). Each Nvidia A100 GPU used by the supercomputer has 80GB of video memory.
All this performance comes at a very high energy cost. However, in addition to being the 33rd most powerful supercomputer in the world and 1st in Latin America, Pegaso is also the most eco-efficient equipment on the continent and second in the oil industry, generating 18,461 gigaflops per watt. In the world ranking of energy efficiency, it appears in 39th position.
Supercomputers are not fit to run Crysis
By operating in an extremely complex segment and with absurd operating costs, oil companies need supercomputers that solve complex calculations for their work to be effective. After all, you don’t want to install an offshore rig to drill the pre-salt layer and find out there was nothing in there.
Pégaso will work with a huge volume of geophysical data, producing images of the Earth’s subsurface with even better quality than other Petrobras supercomputers. The cost of assembling Pegasus was R$ 300 million.
The other state-owned supercomputers, which have already taken over the ranking of the most powerful PCs in Latin America, are: Dragão (14 petaflops), Atlas (8.9 petaflops) and Fênix (5.4 petaflops). The state-owned company will receive more supercomputers in the future and should expand its total performance to 80 petaflops.
A petaflop is equivalent to 1 quadrillion math operations per second. Like a car and its horsepower, more flops mean more performance. However, in computing there are still units of mega, giga, tera, among others. The PS5, for example, has around 12 teraflops of processing.
And no, Pegasus does not have an HDMI or DisplayPort input. It is not possible to put a monitor and go out playing – but you can mine. The supercomputer runs an operating system with the CentOS Linux distribution.
https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/2022/12/20/supercomputador-da-petrobras-com-2-016-gpus-nvidia-a100-e-entregue/