INTRODUCTION
The Spanish Government created the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES, Red Española de Supercomputación) in July 2006, in response to the need of the Spanish scientific community for intensive calculation resources. The RES is a Unique Scientific and Technical Infrastructure (ICTS) distributed throughout Spain, which aims to support the development of top-quality cutting-edge research. COVID pandemic which started March 2020 impacted the way the staff of the RES nodes develop their duites, but the service was 100% operational without any adverse effect on the performance of the HPC resources. Most of the support staff was officially declared essential workers and their mobility to and from the HPC facilities was secured even with a general lockdown. RES Board meeting were held as planned but in a virtual format. Life changed dramatically but the RES adapted to the COVID situation with high effciency.
In May 2020, the RES increased its members by the incorporation of NASERTIC, the node of the Navarra region. Details of the new node were published in the RES News section.
Also in 2020 the RES started its way to become HPC and data services provider for the research community. New data nodes were incorporated to the network such as PIC, existing nodes with only HPC service startted aldo to provide data services, and the first call for data projects was open in November 2020.
The RES network had these 13 nodes at the end of 2020:
INFRASTRUCTURE UPDATE AND COMPUTING POWER
In February 2020, the node in Cáceres, CENITS, inagurated the new infrastructure, LUSITANIA III. Details of the new machine and the inaugural ceremony can be found in the RES News section.
PRIORIZATION OF COVID RESEARCH & RESOURCES GRANTED
During 2020, the Board of the RES decided to launch a priority path for research projects related to COVID pandemic in need of HPC resources in the regular call of the network. 50% of the resources equivalent to 100 millions CPU hours were allocated to COVID research in the call of May 2020.
During 2020, the RES allocated 617 million hours to scientific activities proposed by researchers from the different scientific fields. This amount represents an increase of 12% from last year. The distribution of allocated hours in 2020 for each scientific disciplines is shown in the following pie:
Because of the increase of demand for HPC resources the overall success rate of the RES applications has decreased to 65%.
RESEARCH RESULTS
During 2020, 126 scientific papers were published in the most prestigious journals of different disciplines by research teams using RES resources. They can be searched in the Publications area of the RES website. Overall, more than 900 different international scientists have authored these papers. This high number is due to the many authors that sign astronomy papers.
EVENTS
Users Conference 2020 was held online
Due to COVID lockdown, the 14th edition of the Users Conference (JURES'20) was held online on 16-17 September 2020, under the sponsorship of Fujitsu, IBM and HPCNow!
The RES Award to the best scientific article of a research carried out with the use of RES resources was awarded to Dr. Ion Errea (University of the Basque Country/EHU) for his paper published in Nature in February 2020.
Scientific seminars
Due to the impact of COVID, although five seminar proposals were selected, only two scientific seminars were carried out during 2020. The final resolution of the selection process can be found here. Information about program and speakers can be found in the RES website.
|
Organizer |
Institution |
Title of seminar |
Website |
|
Salvador Capella |
BSC-CNS |
19th European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB2020) |
|
|
Mervi Mantsinen |
BSC-CNS |
1st Spanish Fusion HPC Workshop |
HPI Conference with the participation of the Centers of Excellence (CoE)
The RES and the BSC organized (March 30, 2020) the HPI Conference aimed at promoting the adoption of HPC among the academic, business, and public administration sectors.
OTHER
EuroCC project
The RES participated in Málaga in Febriuary 2020 in the Transfiere fair 2020 devoted to innovation and technology transfer. The RES was among the representation of the members of the Spanish ICTS.
In September 2020, eight of the nodes of the RES network participated in the European project NCC (National Competence Center) to promote the use of HPC among members of the academia, public sector and industry sectors.
