SANTANDER SUPERCOMPUTING SERVICES (SSC) FOR RESEARCHERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CANTABRIA

As a scientific-technical service of the University, the SSC is open to the use of researchers that can benefit of supercomputing in the different projects where they participate.

The service is open to research groups as well as to individual researchers.

There are two options to access the supercomputing services:

TEST SERVICE

Researchers can get direct access to an initial pool of resources to try, test and tune the applications that they intend to execute.

The initial resources granted for an initial test period of three months are the following:

• individual account with access to the login node, to edit, compile and test the application
• submission of jobs requesting up to 128 cores, 24 hours maximum per job, for a total cpu time up to 15.000 hours
• 30 GB of temporal disk space
• access to available software
• best effort support from the SSC team.

The researchers interested only need to send a mail to ssc@unican.es indicating their name, e-mail at unican, phone, department, research group, and a few lines explaining why they would like to access to the supercomputing services, and they will be contacted back by our support team as soon as possible.

Researchers using this test service will be requested only to inform weekly of the progress/use of the supercomputer (one line mail) and to fill a short evaluation form after the test period is over.

PRODUCTION SERVICE

The production service guarantees to researchers the use of the system for execution of jobs requiring large number of processors, storage space, or execution time.

Typical requests may vary between 64 and 1024 cores, 50.000 to 1 Million CPU hours in four months, and 100 GB to 10 TB of disk space. However the ALTAMIRA system can potentially handle requests of up to 2500 cores, 300 Tb and 10 million hours, but in such cases we ask for a previous contact to analyze the proposal.

To access the production service, researchers should fill the corresponding call form, and send it back to the service (ssc@unican.es).

Requests for allocation of resources are handled by an Access Committee, that prioritizes the use of the available resources among the different requests. If resources are available to satisfy the request, access will be granted as soon as possible, but typically, and in particular for large demands, the Comittee will meet three times annually, by the end of February, June and October, to decide.