Supercomputers

Pirineus III

Pirineus is the generic name for the supercomputing equipment at CSUC, recognized as a Singular Scientific and Technical Infrastructure (ICTS), providing computing resources to the research community. So far, three versions of this equipment have been installed. The latest, Pirineus III, was installed in 2023 and entered into operation in October 2024.

An architecture tailored to your needs, 24/7 with personalized support

Pirineus III is a heterogeneous cluster composed of general-purpose nodes, nodes with higher memory capacity, and nodes accelerated with graphic processing units (GPUs), particularly useful for artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

Pirineus III is available 24/7 throughout the year and is adapted to the new requirements of the user community, both academic and industrial, with a special emphasis on artificial intelligence. The supercomputer is a valuable tool for science, generating knowledge and enhancing the research and technological capacity of the scientific and research community in Catalonia. 

Pirineus III is a Singular Scientific and Technical Infrastructure (ICTS) and is integrated into the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES). Through RES, Pirineus III makes part of its computing capacity available to the Spanish scientific community for the development of high-quality scientific and technological projects.

CSUC has a support team that offers specialized and personalized service to users to resolve doubts or issues when using the infrastructure and, as far as possible, the software.

Characteristics of Pirineus III

The computing capacity of Pirineus III is 2.2 Petaflops (Pflop/s). This computational capacity is divided into three distinct parts to optimize performance and resource utilization based on the type of computational task.

The architecture also facilitates resource management by distributing workloads according to the specific needs of each application. Thus, Pirineus III includes: 

• General-purpose block with versatile nodes that can be used for a wide variety of applications. These nodes are suitable for tasks requiring substantial computational power but not extensive memory access.
• Memory-intensive block, consisting of nodes with significantly higher memory capacity compared to general-purpose nodes. These are useful for applications that need to handle large amounts of data in memory (big data, large databases, etc.).
• GPU block, equipped with nodes containing graphic processing units (GPUs). GPUs are excellent for tasks such as artificial intelligence model calculations, molecular dynamics simulations, graphic rendering, etc.

Access to Pirineus III

Users can access Pirineus III through the user login nodes, which is where interaction with the supercomputer occurs. These groups can also access the CSUC's HPC support portal, the space used by the CSUC computing team to communicate with users.

Financing

Pirineus III has been acquired for €3.4 million, financed 94% by the European Union's Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan -NextGenerationEU- through the call for Scientific and Technical Equipment by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (€1.4 million) and the 2022 call for Singular Scientific and Technical Infrastructures (ICTS), funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (€1.8 million). The remaining €200,000 is CSUC's own funding.