Pirineus II and Canigó | RES - Red Española de Supercomputación

Pirineus II and Canigó

At Consorci de Serveis Universitari de Catalunya (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 and UVic-UCC). It was created in December 2013 as a result of the union of the Consorci de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya (CESCA) and the Consorci de Biblioteques Universitàries de Catalunya (CBUC) to foster efficiency in the management of Catalan universities throughout cooperation and coordination.

CSUC shares academic, scientific, librarian, of knowledge transfer and management services within the consortium entities in order to empower synergies and economies of scale, and to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Although the Consortium focuses its activity on the service provisioning, it also participates in projects funded by the European Union, mainly research under Horizon 2020 program.

Technology infrastructure and Data Center

Regarding scientific computing (HPC), the CSUC has two Bull Sequana systems and a Hybrid Bull system complemented by several specialised software in various areas to meet the diverse needs of research projects. The CSUC computing service provides a hardware environment that allows the high-performance execution of software such as Gaussian, VASP, ADF o CP2K (used in computational chemistry), CHARMM, DL_Poly or CPMD (life sciences), or Ansys Fluent, Abaqus or OpenFOAM (more oriented to industrial users, especially in engineering). For some of these applications, the CSUC can provide the licenses, but in most cases, the user must provide the license if needed.

CSUC Data Center houses the equipment that serve its users like the high density hardware: supercomputers, and low density hardware: storage systems, routers, switches of the Anella Scientific and RedIRIS, among others.

The Data Center climate control guarantees optimum temperature conditions with sustainable energy requirements optimized with respect to indicators that quantify the efficiency in the use of energy in real time (Power Usage Effectiveness, PUE). This applies the energy efficiency index with a PUE of 1.5, considered as an efficient value. CSUC works to ensure that this reduction in energy consumption is a continuous process and is expanded day by day based on real indicators.

CSUC services are 24/7. The Consortium has indeed a redundant infrastructure with high availability and monitoring systems to offer the greatest quality as possible in its services.

Visit the RES node website

Machine information

HPC Resources

Nombre de la máquina	Pirineus III fase 1
% dedicated to RES	83%
Peak Performance	257 TFlop/s
Main Memory	14 TB
Number of nodes	59
Main nodes characteristics	High-Performance cluster
Type of CPU	19 nodes with Intel Xeon Platinum 8268 2.9GHz 40 nodes with Intel Gold 6342 2.8 GHz
Number of cores per node	48
GFlop/s per core	Intel Platinum 8268: 93 GFlop/s Intel Gold 6342: 90 GFlop/s
Other characteristics	BeeGFS shared disc system
Disk storage	200 TB Local + 236TB shared
Interconnection networks	Infiniband 100 GB and Infiniband 200 Gb
Operating system	Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Data projects Resources

Core Features: Archival projects and Data storage, regardless of discipline
Available storage space (TB)	1000 TB
Standard protocol for external access	SIR2/UNIFICAT
Standard data transfer protocol	S3 y FTP
High speed network connection RedIRIS/autonomous networks	Yes
Backup protocol	Yes
Security system	By Username/Password
Monitorization system	RTiR
Personnel assigned to support users who access the center through the network	5 FTE

Optional characteristics: data storage and exploration projects (basic exploitation), generic and/or specific by subject area
Federated access protocol (EduGAIN, SIR, …)	No
Optimized transfer system for large volumes of data	Yes
Treatment of personal data and ethics committee	Yes
Data management policy

Additional features: More specific exploitation projects, with advanced tools, and/or depending on the subject area

Data services for scientific projects (maintained by the node)

Version control in S3

Support and consulting service for other nodes of the data network

Support team / Contact

CSUC gives support to researchers to progress in their projects, as well as to preserve and disseminate their results. In the supercomputing service, CSUC provides technical and scientific support to the user to optimise the use of the available resources.

Our team, with a scientific background and research experience, is an expert in both scientific and computational aspects and provides, among others:

Advice to define the resources needed and the most adequate software.
Training and documentation about supercomputing resources.
Support in day-to-day issues and doubts.
Installing computing software and related applications under request.

In addition, the CSUC HPC Portal (http://hpc.csuc.cat) is an interface to provide support to users and to unify access to the supercomputing service, making it more efficient and easy to use.