Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is working to develop climate models that will help prevent extreme weather events, part of a push to set up a public supercomputer that can use millions of data points to tackle national challenges.
Mexican researchers will work along with Barcelona’s Supercomputing Center to standardize Mexico’s weather data to improve climate forecasts and early warnings, according to Fabián Vázquez Romaña, the coordinator of the National Meteorological Service.
While still in its early stages, the supercomputer has become one of Sheinbaum’s flagship initiatives. Named Coatlicue after an Aztec deity that was the mother of other gods and a source of energy, the project aims to give Mexico data-processing power equivalent to about 375,000 ordinary computers running at the same time. It will be used for climate predictions, energy planning and corruption prevention, among other issues.
The government will spend 6 billion pesos ($340 million) on the supercomputer, which will reach 314,000 trillion operations per second — seven times more than Pegaso, Brazil’s largest supercomputer. Coatlicue will also have more than a hundred times the capacity of Mexico’s most advanced existing system, Yuca, located in Sonora, according to the government.
