University of Málaga Secures €10 Million to Upgrade Picasso Supercomputer, Boosting Spain’s HPC and AI Capabilities

The University of Málaga (UMA) has secured €10 million ($11.4 million) to upgrade the Picasso supercomputer, a high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure that serves researchers across Spain through the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES). This investment underscores Andalusia’s growing role as a national hub for scientific computing and artificial intelligence.

The funding, provided by Spain’s Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities, is part of a broader national strategy to strengthen supercomputing and AI capabilities amid surging demand for HPC resources from universities, research centers, and private companies. The upgrade will replace the current system with a new platform offering significantly greater processing power, expanded storage capacity, and improved energy efficiency, tailored to meet the demands of fields such as artificial intelligence, scientific simulation, and big data analysis.

Operational for over a decade, Picasso is a key node of the Spanish Supercomputing Network and provides critical computing capacity for scientific projects in bioinformatics, physics, engineering, materials science, and AI. The new hardware will handle increasingly intensive workloads, particularly those related to AI model training and accelerated computing. In addition to performance gains, the upgraded system will prioritize energy efficiency, an increasingly vital consideration in the design of large-scale HPC platforms.

The investment further strengthens Andalusia’s overall computing capacity. In recent weeks, the University of Granada also announced plans to expand its HPC infrastructure with two new supercomputers dedicated to research and AI, reinforcing the region’s position as a center of computational excellence.