In addition to its new fleet of supercomputers, Petrobras has also deployed its first AI supercomputer, Tatu.
Brazil’s National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (LNCC) has received the equipment and begun to increase the capacity of its Santos Dumont supercomputer.
The upgrade has been undertaken in collaboration with Petrobras, with the hardware provided by Eviden, the supercomputing unit of French IT services provider Atos.
The $19.4 million contract was first announced in April 2024 and will add 17 petaflops of compute power to the system, a four-fold increase. The system launched in 2015 with 1.1 petaflops of performance; an expansion in 2019 added 1.85 petaflops, based on the Sequana X1000 architecture.
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. It will make the supercomputer the fastest in Latin America dedicated to scientific research, and will see it placed back on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
In September 2024, Petrobras announced plans to invest $89m for the acquisition of five new Lenovo supercomputers, set to be housed at the state-owned oil and gas company’s development and innovation centre in Cenpes, Rio de Janeiro.
In addition to its new fleet of supercomputers, Petrobras has also deployed its first AI supercomputer, Tatu, comprising 224 Nvidia GPUs with 80GB of memory distributed across 11 racks in a 7.4m row.
