Two leading Spanish universities are expanding their advanced computing capabilities through separate European-backed projects designed to support the growing demands of Artificial Intelligence research and public sector innovation.
The University of Malaga has secured €3.21 million to enhance Picasso, the high-performance computing system operated by its Supercomputing and Bioinformatics Centre (SCBI). The funding, awarded through three European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) projects under the 2024 programme, reflects increasing demand from researchers for more powerful computing resources capable of handling AI-driven scientific workloads.
The investment has transformed the centre’s infrastructure by increasing both processing performance and data storage. Fast-access storage based on NVMe flash technology has been expanded to one petabyte, while long-term capacity using conventional hard drives has grown by as much as five petabytes.
To improve AI performance, the SCBI has also installed 16 Nvidia B200 graphics processors across two new compute nodes, each featuring 4TB of memory. The upgrades reinforce the centre’s standing as the second most powerful facility in the Spanish Supercomputing Network and the country’s third largest for storage. The announcement follows recent confirmation that the University of Malaga will also host what is expected to be Europe’s most powerful quantum computer.
At the University of Granada, plans are under way to install a second supercomputer dedicated to Artificial Intelligence through the €3.5 million Eunomia project. The system will sit alongside a separate €5 million machine being acquired by the Junta de Andalucía, further establishing Granada as a key centre for advanced computing in southern Europe.
Both systems will be based at the university’s Centre for Computer Services and Communication Networks, where facilities are being upgraded with the necessary power, cooling and technical infrastructure.
The larger supercomputer will primarily support AI model training and computational research for Andalusia’s scientific community, while the Eunomia platform will help a consortium of 34 organisations from 14 countries develop and test generative AI applications for public services. By sharing computing resources, the initiative aims to accelerate the adoption of sovereign AI technologies while reducing duplicated investment across participating organisations.
