Pirineus III - CSUC
The Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya (CSUC) is a public entity formed by the Generalitat de Catalunya and 10 Catalan universities (UB, UAB, UPC, UPF, UdL, UdG, URV, UOC, URL y UVic-UCC). It was founded in December 2013 as a result of the merging of the Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya (CESCA) and the Consorci de Biblioteques Universitàries de Catalunya (CBUC) to promote efficiency in the management of Catalan universities through cooperation and coordination. Thus, CSUC shares academic, scientific, library, knowledge transfer, and management services among the consortium entities, aiming to enhance synergies and economies of scale to improve effectiveness and efficiency. While the Consortium focuses its activity on service provision, it also participates in projects funded by the European Union, primarily in research.
For scientific computation, CSUC has, among others, the Pirineus III supercomputer. CSUC's computing service provides a hardware environment that allows the execution of software such as Gaussian, VASP, ADF, CP2K, CHARMM, DL_Poly, CPMD, Ansys Fluent, Abaqus, or OpenFOAM. For some of these applications, CSUC has its own licenses (Gaussian, ADF), but in most cases, the user must provide the license if necessary. The CSUC's Data Center hosts equipment that serves its users, such as high-density hardware: supercomputers, and low-density systems: storage systems, routers, switches of the Anella Científica, and RedIRIS, among others.
The air conditioning of the Data Processing Center (DPC) ensures optimal temperature conditions with sustainable energy requirements optimized based on indicators quantifying energy efficiency in real-time. Thus, the energy efficiency index is applied with a PUE of 1.5, considered an efficient value. CSUC works to make this reduction in energy expenditure a continuous process and to expand it day by day based on real indicators.
The services are operational 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. To offer the highest quality in its services, CSUC has a redundant infrastructure in high availability and monitoring systems.
HPC resources
Machine name | Pirineus III |
% of the machine destined to RES | 20% |
Peak performance | 427 TFlop/s |
Main memory | 43 TB |
Number of nodes and cores | 58 nodes (11 136 cores) |
Main nodes characteristics | 50 nodes: 2x AMD Epyc 9654 2.4 GHz 8 nodes: 2x AMD Epyc 9654 2.4 GHz AND 3TB of RAM |
CPU type | AMD Epyc 9654 2.4 GHz |
GFlop/s per node | 7 373 GFlop/s |
Disk storage | 200 TB local + 236 TB shared via BeeGFS |
Interconnection network | Infiniband 100 Gb and Infiniband 200 Gb |
Operating System | Red Hat Enterprise Linux |
Machine name | Pirineus III - GPU |
% of the machine destined to RES | 20% |
Peak performance | 1.59 PFlop/s |
Main memory | 11 TB |
Number of nodes and cores | 29 nodes (1 856 cores + GPU) |
Main nodes characteristics | 2x AMD Epyc 9334 2.7 GHz 2x NVIDIA H100 80 GB HBM |
CPU type | AMD Epyc 9334 2.7 GHz NVIDIA H100 80 GB HBM |
GFlop/s per node | 54 827 GFlop/s |
Disk storage | 200 TB NFS + 2 PB shared via BeeGFS |
Interconnection network | Infiniband HDR 200 Gb/s |
Operating System | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.9 |
DATA resources
Core Features: Archival projects and Data storage, regardless of discipline | |
Available storage space | 1000 TB |
Standard protocol for external access | SIR2, UNIFICAT |
Standard data transfer protocol | S3, FTP |
RedIRIS high speed network connection | Yes |
Backup protocol | Yes |
Security system | User/password system |
Monitoring system | RTiR |
Personnel assigned to support users | 5 FTE |
Optional features: data storage and exploration projects (basic exploitation), generic and/or specific by subject area | |
Federated access protocol (EduGAIN, SIR ...) | No |
Transfer system optimized for large volumes of data | Yes |
Treatment of personal data and ethics committee | Yes |
Data management policy | No |
Additional features: More specific exploitation projects, with advanced tools, and/or depending on the subject area | |
Data services for scientific projects | Version control in S3 |
Support and consulting services for other noders of the data network | No |
Support team
From CSUC, researchers are provided support to advance in their research projects, as well as to preserve and disseminate results. Specifically for the supercomputing service, CSUC offers technical and scientific support to users to maximize the use of available resources. The CSUC team has expertise and technical and scientific training to provide, among other things:
- Guidance to define the necessary resources for calculations and to choose and use suitable software.
- Training and documentation on supercomputing resources and the best way to utilize them.
- Installation of supercomputing software and related utilities upon user request.
- Assistance in resolving day-to-day doubts and problems.
Additionally, CSUC offers the HPC Portal, an interface for user support and assistance that functions as a single access point to the supercomputing service, making it more efficient, easy, and accessible. Users can also directly contact CSUC support at style="color:rgb(0, 174, 239);" hpc@csuc.cat
