Supercomputer "Bob", which the minister of science had announced for the first half of 2018, will increase the national computing capacity ten-fold and encourage business and scientific cooperation in data science and artificial intelligence the Science and Technology Foundation (FCT in the original Portuguese) said.

The Minho Advanced Computing Centre, which has also inaugurated, belongs to the Minho University which installed and commissioned the computer in conjunction with the FCT.

The Portuguese supercomputer which is part of the Iberian Advanced Computing Network will be used for bio-computing, climate studies, maritime safety, fishing, city mobility or risk management in forest fires, the ministry of science said.

A second computer, "Deucalion", capable of 10 petaflops (10 thousand million million) operations a second is also going to start being installed at the Minho Advanced Computing Centre by late 2020.

The "Deucalion", which is the result of a dual application by Portugal and Spain, which will house the other, larger supercomputer in Barcelona has about 40 times the computing power of "Bob", the European Commission (EC) said.