Narayan AmmachchiThe Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation (Minciencias) of Colombia partnered with several universities and research institutes to build a supercomputing system using unused data centers.
To be built at a cost of US$330,000, the supercomputer can be used for a variety of purposes, including scientific research, weather forecasting and medical imaging.
If everything goes according to plan, the computer will be operational by the end of 2025.
The device is already available at Colombia’s Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BIOS). The ministry only needs data centers to set up the supercomputer.
“There is a 17 billion [Colombian] pesos computer that does nothing. We will spend 1.5 billion pesos to put it into operation so that this supercomputer, one of the few that Latin America has, helps in developing the entire innovation ecosystem [in Colombia],” Minciencias said in a press release.
The ministry has collaborated with technology experts, who will soon upgrade the underutilized data centers and connect them to a high-speed network in order to process data at speeds of up to 100 petaflops.
Analysts expect the project to create hundreds of jobs in the tech sector, in addition to boosting the country’s economy by US$1 billion.
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