The Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) inaugurated today its Scientific Computing Center (C3), a new state-of-the-art supercomputing facility designed to support R&D&I projects with high demands in computation, storage and data processing. This supercomputer, ranked 81st worldwide according to the IO500 ranking, reinforces the University’s commitment to scientific and technological excellence and will be available to the UC3M research community, other research centers, and interested companies. The C3 will represent a major advance in socially impactful research in fields such as aeronautics, biology, and health sciences, among others.
The launch event, held today at the Center for Innovation in Entrepreneurship and Artificial Intelligence (C3N-IA) of the UC3M Science Park – Leganés Tecnológico, where the supercomputer is located, was attended by the Rector of UC3M, Ángel Arias, who expressed his gratitude to the entire university community that has made the deployment of this supercomputer possible. “This new facility ranks 64th in the IO500 in the field of supercomputing; in other words, it is among the top 15 percent of the most powerful infrastructures worldwide in terms of computing capacity with storage capacity,” the Rector stated.
The new system features a computing cluster comprising more than 11,500 physical CPU cores based on high-performance AMD processors, as well as 42 NVIDIA A40 GPUs. All these resources are interconnected via a high-speed network and supported by a redundant storage system offering nearly 1,000 terabytes of capacity. “Thanks to this power and capacity, the infrastructure enables the processing of large volumes of data, the execution of complex numerical simulations, and the training or deployment of advanced artificial intelligence models,” explains David Expósito Singh, from the UC3M Department of Computer Science, one of the promoters of this infrastructure together with Professor Jesús Carretero.
Potential applications
“This system will enable us to carry out extremely high-fidelity scientific simulations, ranging from molecular dynamics to aeronautics; to process very large datasets, such as those derived from societal and environmental data, genetic sequencing, or medical imaging; to accelerate next-generation artificial intelligence and deep-learning models, which are essential in areas such as computer vision, robotics, language processing, and automated discovery; and to apply algorithms, develop new theories, and validate hypotheses in timeframes that, on smaller computers, are measured in months and could now be achieved in hours or days,” explains Jesús Carretero.
This scientific infrastructure, which is part of the UC3M
Research Support Center (CAI), is not only available to UC3M researchers, but is also open to public research organizations and external users from the business sector. In addition, it provides services aimed at facilitating technology transfer and the development of research projects requiring large-scale computational resources. The C3 offers advanced hybrid High-Performance Computing (HPC) services and reliable data storage, adapting to projects that require both CPU- and GPU-intensive computing.
The new supercomputer has been funded through European NextGenerationEU funds, as well as national and regional grants, including competitive infrastructure projects awarded by the Spanish State Research Agency (EQC2021-007184-P) for research in the simulation of complex engineering systems, and by the Community of Madrid to support research actions related to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, financed with REACT-EU resources from the European Regional Development Fund (REACT-PREDCOV-CM-23475).
More information:
Scientific Computing Center (C3):
https://www.uc3m.es/cai/C3