History

This section presents the evolution of GridUnesp year by year, from its conception to the present day.

The video below summarises the history of GridUnesp since its creation.

2008 - Infrastructure Announcement

UNESP announces the largest high-performance computing infrastructure in Latin America.

Total investment: R$ 8 million

  • Ministry of Science and Technology: R$ 4.4 million (via Finep/Fundunesp)

  • UNESP: R$ 3.6 million

Acquisition: Competitive bidding process won by Sun Microsystems of Brazil.

Original hardware specifications:

  • Processors: Quad Core Intel Xeon 5400

  • Processing cores: 2,048

  • Capacity: 33.3 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second)

Composition:

  • Central cluster: 256 processing nodes on the UNESP campus in São Paulo (Barra Funda)

  • Six distributed clusters: 16 nodes each, on the campuses of:

    • Araraquara

    • Bauru

    • Botucatu

    • Ilha Solteira

    • Rio Claro

    • São José do Rio Preto

Connectivity:

  • High-speed connection to the North American Internet2

  • MetroSampa network linking institutions in the São Paulo metropolitan area

  • ANSP/RNP/Florida International University network between São Paulo and Miami

  • FAPESP’s KyaTera network connecting São Paulo to the interior clusters

Benefits for the scientific community:

  • Remote access for large-scale computational operations

  • Support for areas requiring processing and analysis of large data volumes

  • Reduction in research computation time

  • Performance leadership with low energy consumption

  • International partnerships (Open Science Grid – USA, European and Asian grids)

2009 - Start of Operations

GridUnesp begins operation, representing a Brazilian milestone in:

  • High-performance computing

  • Long-distance optical networks for scientific research

Equivalent capacity at the time:

  • 10,000 personal computers

  • Storage equivalent to an 18-storey tower of stacked DVDs

  • Communication speed 5,000 times faster than home broadband

Training:

First course offered at the Center for Scientific Computing of UNESP (NCC/Unesp), covering:

  • In-person format with online broadcast

  • Basic operation of GridUnesp

  • Compilers and development tools

  • Parallelism and optimisation techniques

2010 - Expansion and Outreach

MasterClass Event:

Reception of high-school students during an international event, including:

  • Presentation on the GridUnesp infrastructure

  • Visit to the cluster at the Datacenter

Year-end metrics:

  • 26 registered scientific projects

  • Areas covered: Biophysics, Biology, Materials Science, Computing, Physics, Geosciences, Chemistry

  • 90 registered members

  • 10 million processing hours

2011 - Accelerated Growth

  • New call for project registration

  • 12 new scientific projects

  • 41 new users

  • More than 20 million processing hours

2012 - International Recognition

Higgs Boson Discovery:

Scientists connected to GridUnesp take part in the discovery at CERN.

CERN Visit:

A delegation of six physicists from the European Organization for Nuclear Research visits GridUnesp, related to Brazil’s bid for associate membership.

2013 - Consolidation and New Services

HPC Administrators Workshop:

  • Support for technical teams of research groups

  • Training based on GridUnesp’s operational experience

  • Creation of a professional network for knowledge exchange

Intel Software Conference:

  • Parallel programming focused on Intel Xeon Phi

  • Hands-on activities

ANSPGrid CA:

Deployment of the ANSPGrid CA Certification Authority at NCC/Unesp:

  • Issuance of X.509 grid certificates for researchers

  • Public-key cryptography for the São Paulo scientific community

  • Compliance with International Grid Trust Federation (IGTF) guidelines

2014 - Accessibility

Creation of a web portal to facilitate researchers’ access:

  • Intuitive interface for a complete workflow

  • Developed with free and open-source code

  • Accessible via browser

Press visit:

Trainee reporters from the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo visit the infrastructure during the Science and Health Training Programme.

2015 - Expressive Milestones

GridUnesp reaches:

  • More than 60 registered scientific projects

  • More than 300 registered users

  • More than 140 million processing hours

2016 - Upgrade and Scientific Achievements

Gravitational wave discovery:

LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) announces the detection of gravitational waves. GridUnesp was:

  • The second largest contributor to processing, behind only Fermilab

  • 7.5 million hours processed (12.3% of the total in OSG)

Acquisition of new equipment (upgrade):

  • Funding: R$ 2.2 million from Finep

  • Supplier: Huawei

New hardware specifications:

Processing:

  • 56 servers (1,568 cores)

  • 2 Intel E5-2680 v4 processors (2.4 GHz) per server

  • 28 cores per server

  • 4 GB per core

  • 40 GB/s network

  • 60 TFlops (theoretical)

Management:

  • 4 servers with 12 cores each

  • 40 GbE network

Storage:

  • 288 TB raw (216 TB effective)

  • NL-SAS 4 TB disks with Lustre technology

  • 4 control servers

Internal network:

  • 40 GbE interconnecting processing nodes

  • 2 switches with 32 ports of 40 GbE each

Upgrade gains:

  • Solution for saturated infrastructure

  • 15-fold reduction in energy consumption

New documentation:

Release of the reformulated and updated user documentation.

2017 - Upgrade Completion

Final capacity:

Feature

Before

After upgrade

Processing

23 TFlops

77 TFlops

Storage

136 TB

288 TB

CPU Cores

2,048

3,104

2018 - Expansion and Statistics

ANSPGrid CA:

  • Certificates now issued to research institutes across all of Brazil

  • Certificate Policy updated (version 2.0)

Statistics:

  • More than 80 registered scientific projects

  • 500 registered users

  • 170 million processing hours

  • More than 200 publications using GridUnesp resources

2019 - Science Outreach

Special MasterClass event:

Celebration of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science:

  • Around 100 girls from public and private schools

  • Presentation of Physics topics (Standard Model)

  • Visit to the cluster at the Data Center

2020 - Pandemic and Accelerated Demand

Operations:

  • Team working in remote mode

  • Remote maintenance of almost all systems

Demand:

  • More than 100 registered projects (19 in 2020 alone)

  • More than 650 registered users (75 in 2020)

  • Around 13 million processing hours in the year

2021 - Remote Continuity

  • Maintenance of remote working regime

  • 67 new registered users

  • More than 11 million processing hours

ANSPGrid CA:

  • Root certificate renewed for a further 10 years

  • Certificate Policy updated (version 3.0)

2022 - Return and Consolidation

  • Return to in-person work

  • Rare idle periods for the cluster

  • More than 1,000 daily jobs in the partition (≈50% running simultaneously)

  • Release of user documentation version 2.0

2023-2024 - Continuous Expansion

New equipment:

  • New 400 TB storage system with the installation of a more modern and reliable system

  • GPU nodes to meet demands from machine learning and artificial intelligence

Community:

  • More than 140 registered projects

  • More than 850 registered users

  • Continuous scientific output across multiple areas of knowledge

2025 - New Milestones

  • Surpasses 1,000 registered users

  • Intensive GPU use: more than 50,000 jobs in one year

  • More than 160 scientific applications and corresponding versions installed since 2017

See also