Argentina has kicked off construction of Clementina XXI, a 15.3 petaflops supercomputer, at the computing center of the Meteorological Service (SMN) in Buenos Aires.

The supercomputer was bought in 2022 for $4.9 million, funding for which was provided by the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAF).

Ten percent of the supercomputer's capacity will be used by Argentina's weather service, with the remaining capacity shared between the 21 members of the National Science and Technology System in the country.

Clementina XXI is comprised of 296 Intel Ponte Vecchio GPU accelerators and 5,120 cores in Intel Sapphire Rapids HBM processors.

The supercomputer is the result of a joint plan between the Science and Technology Ministry, the Defense Ministry, and the Meteorological Service and Research Council Conicet, and was built by Lenovo.

“This computer returns to the idea of the first Clementina XXI, which was to train human resources and accompany them with a computing system that would allow Argentine science to make important advances," said Celeste Saulo, director of the SMN.

"This computing capacity can be applied to materials physics, molecular biology, nanotechnology, astrophysics, meteorology, or any discipline that needs to make models to solve, simulate and experiment with possible states."

Clementina XXI is around forty times more powerful than the current supercomputer used by the SMN which is called Huayra Muyu and has a capacity of 340 teraflops.