Brazilian petroleum company Petrobras (Petroleo Brasileiro) has announced the upcoming inauguration of its new Rio de Janeiro-based supercomputer, Pegasus (aka Pegaso).
With 21 petaflops of power, 678TB of RAM memory, 2,016 GPUs, and a 400GB/s Internet link, Pegasus will be the most powerful supercomputer in Latin America.
Construction is underway, with operations at the Vargem Grande facility expected to commence in December 2022.
Petrobras is a state-owned multinational corporation working in refining, producing, and distributing a variety of petroleum products including crude oil, natural gas liquids, and biodiesel.
The new supercomputer will bring the company's current processing capacity from 42 to 63 petaflops and will be used for the processing of geophysical and geological data, an important aspect in enabling the company’s programs such as the EXP100 effort for using data in exploratory projects, and PROD1000 which aims to reduce the time to start production in a field.
Over the last few years, Petrobras has invested heavily in supercomputing. In June 2021, the company announced that operations were commencing at the Dragão supercomputer, which remains the region's most powerful until the introduction of Pegasus.
In 2020, Petrobras director of Digital Transformation and Innovation, Nicolás Simone, told BNAmericas the company had gone from three petaflops of supercomputing capacity in 2018 to 10 in 2019 and 21 in 2020. He said the company hoped to reach 72 petaflops by the end of 2021 and 110 by the end of 2022, so it appears the company is slightly behind that goal.
