Universidad Nacional de Córdoba inaugurates Helvetios supercomputer

The National University of Córdoba (UNC) has officially inaugurated Helvetios, a supercomputer donated by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The equipment, which arrived in pieces and was assembled by Argentine scientists in one month, triples the computing capacity of the university’s previous most powerful cluster, Serafín.

Helvetios is an ultra-dense, CPU-only architecture consisting of 288 nodes, each equipped with two Xeon Gold 6140 processors and 192 gigabytes of RAM. The system is specifically designed for high-precision simulations in fields such as pharmacology, astronomy, and engineering. It is also expected to be available for use by the private sector.

The installation of this high-performance computing resource comes amid a period of significant budget constraints for Argentine universities. Recent reports indicate a real-term decrease in transfers to universities and a reduction in public investment for science, technology, and innovation.