The Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES) is a distributed infrastructure involving the interconnexion of 12 supercomputers which work together to offer High Performance Computing resources to the scientific community. It is coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).
The RES is a Unique Scientific and Technical Infrastructure (ICTS) distributed throughout Spain.
Currently the RES is composed of 12 supercomputers located in different research centres and universities.
The Spanish Supercomputing Network was created in March 2007 by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science, in order to respond to the increasing needs of computing resources in Spain. To achieve this, MareNostrum supercomputer was upgraded and the old nodes from MareNostrum were used to create five new nodes (Altamira, CesarAugusta, LaPalma, Picasso, Tirant).
In 2009 Atlante supercomputer joined the network. The software of the supercomputers was upgraded to the same level.
In 2011 Magerit was upgraded and became the most powerful supercomputer in Spain and of this network.
In 2014 it opens in Tenerife, Teide-HPC supercomputer, which was at that time the second most powerful in Spain. [1] Its calculation capacity is 10,000 office computers.
In 2015, 5 new nodes became part of the network: Finisterrae II at CESGA, Pirineus at Consorcio de Servicios Universitarios de Cataluña (CSUC), Lusitania at the Fundación Computación y Tecnologías Avanzadas de Extremadura, Caléndula at the Centro de Supercomputación de Castilla y León, and Cibeles at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid [2] In May 2016, Atlante supercomputer stopped its activity in the RES, and in December 2018 Magerit exit the RES. Currently, the network is composed of 11 institutions and 12 supercomputers.
All the supercomputing resources are aimed at non-profit R&D purposes. They are open to Spanish research groups from academia and public research centres. Research groups based in other countries can also apply for RES resources, but the participation of Spanish researchers is recommended.
Computing resources are granted by means of competitive calls. Proposals are evaluated every four months by the Access Committee, which is advised by an Expert Panel composed of prestigious scientists. The use of RES resources is allocated based on the criteria of excellence and scientific impact. Research groups do not need to pay for the use of RES resources. [3]
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, there are supercomputers which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS).
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from conventional high-performance computing systems such as cluster computing in that grid computers have each node set to perform a different task/application. Grid computers also tend to be more heterogeneous and geographically dispersed than cluster computers. Although a single grid can be dedicated to a particular application, commonly a grid is used for a variety of purposes. Grids are often constructed with general-purpose grid middleware software libraries. Grid sizes can be quite large.
MareNostrum is the main supercomputer in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It is the most powerful supercomputer in Spain, one of thirteen supercomputers in the Spanish Supercomputing Network and one of the seven supercomputers of the European infrastructure PRACE.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is a public research center located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It hosts MareNostrum, a 13.7 Petaflops, Intel Xeon Platinum-based supercomputer, which also includes clusters of emerging technologies. In June 2017, it ranked 13th in the world. As of November 2021, it dropped to 74th.
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Mateo Valero Cortés is a Spanish computer architect. His research encompasses different concepts within the field of computer architecture, a discipline in which he has published more than 700 papers in journals, conference proceedings and books. Valero has received numerous awards, including the Eckert–Mauchly Award in 2007, for "extraordinary leadership in building a world class computer architecture research center, for seminal contributions in the areas of vector computing and multithreading, and for pioneering basic new approaches to instruction-level parallelism." He is the director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which hosts the MareNostrum supercomputer.
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The HPC-Europa programmes are European Union (EU) funded research initiatives in the field of high-performance computing (HPC). The programmes concentrate on the development of a European Research Area, and in particular, improving the ability of European researchers to access the European supercomputing infrastructure provided by the programmes' partners. The programme is currently in its third iteration, known as "HPC-Europa3" or "HPCE3", and fully titled the "Transnational Access Programme for a Pan-European Network of HPC Research Infrastructures and Laboratories for scientific computing".
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