FCTUC – Faculdade Ciencias e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra

The University of Coimbra (UC) is the oldest University in Portugal, dating back to the XIII century, and is an indisputable reference in higher education and research in Portugal. UC has the largest percentage of students from abroad in Portugal. It belongs to the "Coimbra Group", which includes many of the most prestigious European Universities like Bologna, Cambridge, Heidelberg, Oxford, Bergen and Barcelona.

The Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra (FCTUC) (Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Coimbra) is the biggest Faculty of the University of Coimbra, with close to 7000 students, both undergraduate and postgraduate. It offers a large array of different degrees, in Engineering, Life Sciences, Exact Sciences, Architecture and Anthropology. It is also very much committed to outreach and close relationships with industry – the most successful company incubator in Portugal, the Pedro Nunes Institute, is linked to FCTUC, and that some of the best Portuguese spin-off companies came out of the University of Coimbra.

The “Laboratório de Computação Avançada” (LCA) of the University hosts the most powerful supercomputer in Portugal, “Milipeia”, and provides CPU time through submission of research projects to scientists from 14 Universities and Research Institutes in Portugal. Researchers from FCTUC have been actively engaged in research which requires HPC: Condensed Matter Physics, High Energy Physics, Lattice QCD, Quantum Chemistry and Protein Folding/Unfolding. Condensed Matter Physics researchers are co-developers of OCTUPUS, a widely used TDFT code which is now part of the PRACE benchmark suite.

The research centre CISUC (Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra) has a longtime experience in research related to distributed computing. The group Software and Systems Engineering does research in GRID middleware (it participates in the COREGRID Network of Excellence) and has done world-wide recognized research on dependable software for critical systems. Some years ago its researchers developed a version of MPI for Windows which was sold by the spin-off company Critical Software.

UC-LCA will contribute to the development of the PRACE peer review system, the relations with the stakeholders of the European HPC ecosystem and the Tier-1 systems access model as well as contribute to porting and scalability tests of application software and development of software technologies for future large-scale systems.

3rd party relations

The University of Coimbra has collaborated in HPC related matters with the Group of Lasers and Plasmas (GoLP) of the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) for some years now. The GoLP have expertise in massively parallel simulations of lasers in plasmas, and they are co-developers of the code OSIRIS which has been run in some of the largest supercomputers in the US and Europe. They participate in DECI program of DEISA and have shown the ability of their code to scale up to Petaflop/s performance range.