The Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES) Council, chaired by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, approved the incorporation of five new nodes to its networking. Universitat de València, which is part of the RES, has manage since 2012 the node of Valencia, through the Tirant 2 team. The vice-principal of Research of Universitat de València, Pilar Campins, attended the meeting.
The following supercomputers will join the RES thanks to this agreement: Finis Terrae II, of the CESGA (The Supercomputing Centre of Galicia); Pirineus, of the Consorcio de Servicios Universitarios de Cataluña (Consortium of University Services of Catalonia); Lusitania, of the Computing and Advanced Technologies Foundation of Extremadura; Caléndula, of the Supercomputing Centre of Castile and León, and Cibeles, of the Autonomous University of Madrid.
The Council, which gathered together on Wednesday for the first time, approved the subscription of a multilateral convention among the participating entities to improve its effectiveness. This initiative implies a fundamental agreement for the co-ordination of supercomputing in Spain, which is a key element for the scientific and technological development of the country. This coordination increases both the excellence of the set of the RES as the each centre individually, as the execution of gathered projects and the measures of common interest in the field of research, technological development, innovation, formation and divulgation are encouraged.
The main goal of this new convention is to make RES offer an optimized and unified service for its supercomputing users in Spain, applying homogeneous criteria of access for its use thanks to an efficient co-ordination of the managed resources. The supercomputing centres will give in some of their resources so that a common and independent Access Committee can manage it, and it will evaluate its access petitions by attending to the scientific excellence and to the real need of supercomputing from the interested people.
RES
The Spanish Supercomputing Network is a distributed infrastructure which began in 2008 to give support to the needs of supercomputing of different research groups. Its fundamental goal is to provide service to the scientific community. The Network is centrally co-ordinated and managed since then by the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre–the National Supercomputing Centre (BSC-CNS), and it offers a service to its users throughout around Spain. The positive results that where achieved since then and the great growth of supercomputing advise us to coordinate some efforts, to take advantage of the different experiences and to share the resources of the different infrastructures.
Nowadays, RES is made of the Tirant 2 supercomputers from Universitat de València; MareNostrum 3, MinoTauro and Altix from the BSC-CNS; Magerit 2, from the Supercomputing and Visualization Centre in Madrid of the Technical University of Madrid; LaPalma 2, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (Astrophysics Institute of the Canary Islands); Altamira 2, of the University of Cantabria; Picasso 2, of the University of Málaga; CaesarAugusta 2, of the Institute of Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI) of the University of Zaragoza, and Atlante, of the Canarian Technology Institute.
TIRANT 2
Tirant 2 is the node of Valencia from the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES). Its management is performed by Universitat de València. It entered into service in December 2012, substituting the previous team (Tirant) and quadrupling computing power. It is made of 512 blades IBM JS21 equipped each one of them of 2 PowerPC 970MP dual core and 8 GB of RAM processors. These teams, which add up to 2048 computing cores, are joined in a network of Myrinet interconnect of high-performance which allows full-duplex connections with a 2 Gbit/s bandwidth with very low latency.
This computer system, which is located in the Campus of Burjassot-Paterna, has some facilities specially designed for it, which include a high-capacity electric supply line, a powerful uninterruptible power supply and a very important cooling infrastructure.
Since its inauguration, Tirant 2 has served a total of 17,5 million hours of calculation. Most of them, 11 million (the 63% of total), were destined to works of Valencian researchers . The almost 6.5 million left were destined to research projects managed by the RES.
Last update: 29 de april de 2015 13:08.
News release