The agreement will extend and deepen the joint efforts of these two supercomputer institutions to manage large capacity shared memory systems - the Finisterrae, at CESGA, and the recently deployed Lusitania at the Extremeño Center for Research, Technological Innovation and Supercomputing at Cenits, which manages the COMPUTAEX Foundation.

The strategic computing infrastructure is key in supporting the development of research programmes and technology innovation in their respective organisations and in Spain. The agreement includes specific actions for joint use of supercomputing resources for users of the two centres in the future, and to promote international mobility of centre scientists and technologists. In this phase of the collaboration, a set shared goals has been specified, including developing a training plan complementary to the centres, the implementation of joint plans for dissemination and popularization of High Performance Computing (HPC), the establishment of a plan to support users as a starting point for future international Technical Working Groups in order to optimize resources and levels of user satisfaction, and a plan to allow researchers and technologists to move among centres.

COMPUTAEX is focused on the development of information technologies and the use of compute-intensive and advanced communications as tools to support sustainable socio-economic development It also encourages the participation of society with special attention to co-operation between public research centres the commercial sector. The recent inauguration in March 2009 of the Lusitania supercomputer at Cenits complements the technological capability for the scientific community at Extremadura. This represents one of the most sophisticated HPC environments, and includes two integrated HP Integrity Superdomes that incorporate a total 256 Intel Itanium2 processor cores and 2 terabytes of memory, making it the largest Superdome shared memory system in Spain.

CESGA depends on the Ministry of Economy and Industry of the Galicia and the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC). With 17 years of expertise, the organisation aims to promote and disseminate compute-intensive services and communication to the research communities and CSIC, as well as to those companies or institutions requesting them. The Finisterrae supercomputer, managed by CESGA, is an integrated system of 144 shared memory nodes and has a total of 20 TB main memory, 390 TB disk and 2,580 Itanium processors. The Finisterrae acquisition was supported by the European Regional Development Fund, ERDF.