The INCD - National Distributed Computing Infrastructure provides digital support for research. More than 35 institutions use these computing and storage services in all areas of knowledge.
The INCD has been constantly evolving since a national computing infrastructure was established in 2008 as part of the National Grid initiative. Recently, it was reported that one of eight European supercomputers will be hosted in Portugal. The machine, said Professor of the University of Minho, António Cunha, the newspaper Público, has a capacity 40 times more powerful Portuguese supercomputer.
This increase in computing power is a way of ensuring that researchers and research units can continue to perform computationally-intensive tasks. This capacity is especially useful, for example, for mass data analysis. European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation Carlos Moedas highlighted the role of supercomputing in helping to "develop personalised medicine, save energy and fight climate change more efficiently".
Similarly, the National Distributed Computing Infrastructure is part of the roadmap of strategic infrastructures dedicated to research. With more than 35 user institutions, this infrastructure is the result of the joint work of the National Scientific Computing Unit of the Foundation for Science and Technology, the National Civil Engineering Laboratory (LNEC) and the Experimental Particle Physics and Instrumentation Laboratory (LIP).
Sharing computing
INCD services are provided from multiple locations in an integrated system logic, with interconnection ensured by a state-of-the-art network infrastructure. This is how INCD supports researchers and enables their participation in (national and international) projects.
The international dimension of the INCD is also evident in the fact that it is integrated in international infrastructures - such as the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), the Iberian Computing Infrastructure (IBERGRID), the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) and the European Science Cloud (EOSC-hub). Through this integration, it is possible to share computing resources with its European counterparts, for the benefit of network users, and this infrastructure is especially geared towards providing scientific computing services.
Serving research
INCD services are used by research and development projects of national and international dimension. Thus, they involve scientific infrastructures, researchers and IT departments of higher education institutions and research units. The access to HTC, HPC, Grid, Cloud and other services is made by filling in a previous registration form.
Each month, the INCD reports, around 380,000 jobs (work units or computational execution) are performed. In total, the infrastructure carries out 950,000 hours of High-performance computing (HPC) and High-throughput computing (HTC) per month. At the same time, around 650,000 hours per month of Cloud Computing - storage and calculation performed by computers and servers interconnected via the Internet - are also performed.
This diversity of solutions, highlights INCD on its website, allows the creation of solutions tailored to the user. On the other hand, they add, the technical team guarantees a close and permanent follow-up, monitoring the evolution of the specificities and needs of each project.
