On the 15th of March, the National Education and Research Network (RNP) gathered representatives of the Leopoldo Américo Miguez de Mello Research and Development Center (CENPES), a Petrobras unit focused on research, development and innovation, to announce the launch of the project “High-performance data movement environment for Science and Technology Institutions STIs”.

The initiative's main focus is to build a high-performance data movement environment, superimposed on RNP's national communication network, for research activities related to the Oil and Gas industry, such as Geosciences and Reservoir Engineering. Such an environment aims to facilitate the access of CENPES/Petrobras researchers to the supercomputing centers of the STIs: National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (LNCC) and SENAI-CIMATEC, with safety, speed in data movement and ease of use.

Currently, part of the projects developed by CENPES in cooperation with STIs demand the use of high-performance computing resources. To support this demand, Petrobras has invested in projects of this nature in order to optimize these systems and reduce transfer times. In addition, the project is linked to a Cooperation Agreement signed between RNP and Petrobras in December 2021.

“The project will expand the capacity of end-to-end access to the high-performance computers used by CENPES to 10Gb/s in the short term, in addition to R&D actions to optimize the performance of final systems and the architecture of the campus network of the STIs and Petrobras, allowing a significant reduction in the total time of data transfers. In the medium term, we want to evolve STI connectivity to 100Gb/s. Another benefit will be long-distance communication between network participants, providing logical traffic segmentation and specific security policies for access to supercomputing environments.”, explains RNP's Research and Development director, Iara Machado.

The project, which also counts with the collaboration of the metropolitan networks of Rio de Janeiro (RedeRio), Salvador (REMESSA) and the Brazilian Center for Physical Research (CBPF), is expected to last two years and also includes the acquisition of hardware for improvement in the performance of the network between CENPES and LNCC and SENAI-CIMATEC.

The event, held in online format, was attended by the director general of RNP, Nelson Simões and the management team of CENPES, in addition to the presence of the Secretary of Entrepreneurship and Innovation (SEMPI) of MCTI and chairman of the Board of Directors of RNP , Dr. Paulo Cesar Rezende de Carvalho Alvim and directors of the STIs involved in the project.