FinisTerrae

Finisterrae was the 100th supercomputer in Top500 ranking in November 2007. Running at 12.97 teraFLOPS, it would rank at position 258 on the list as of June 2008. It is also the third most powerful supercomputer in Spain (after MareNostrum and Magerit). It is located in Galicia.
This project is promoted by the Xunta de Galicia (regional government of Galicia) and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). It was founded in 1993 to serve as a platform to foster scientific innovation and invest in Research and Development.
It is estimated that the base project will be completed in 2010. It is expected to reach the TOP10 of the most powerful supercomputers in the world when it reaches full capacity. The supercomputer is physically hosted at CESGA.
Overview.
The main Finisterrae characteristics are depicted on the following table:
One of the special characteristics about FinisTerrae I supercomputer is the ratio between cores and RAM. This was one reason that it received the denomination of "singular technical and scientific installation" from the Spanish government, a denomination given to some installations which have some value that makes them singular in some way. Some of those installations include the Canary Island grand telescope, or the Alba synchrotron.
Even if this is the third fastest supercomputer in Spain, some projects that require special amounts of memory cannot be held by the first or second supercomputer, and therefore must be executed on the Finisterrae.
Architecture.
FinisTerrae I.
FinisTerrae supercomputer, located in CESGA is an integrated system by shared-memory nodes with and SMP NUMA architecture.
FinisTerrae is composed of 144 computational nodes:
A hierarchic storing system with:
Projects.
As main purpose, the aim of the supercomputer is research. The supercomputer is mainly used by the three universities located in Galicia, (Universidade da Coruña, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela and Universidade de Vigo), as well as other research organizations like CSIC. The main projects held by the supercomputer are divided into four fields: