Contributions to science

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

The Supercomputing Center of Catalonia (CESCA) was in-
augurated in October 1991 with the aim of offering high per-
formance computing services to universities, research cen-
ters and enterprises. The Fundació Catalana per a la
Recerca (FCR) promoted CESCA at the request of the
Departament de Presidència of the Generalitat de
Catalunya. The consortium was also made up of the –at
those time– four public Catalan universities (Universitat de
Barcelona, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Universitat
Politècnica de Catalunya and Universitat Pompeu Fabra).
Later, Universitat de Girona, Universitat Rovira i Virgili,
Universitat de Lleida and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
were also incorporated. To facilitate the access to its re-
sources, since 1993 it manages the Anella Científica
(Scientific Ring), sponsored by the FCR, the communica-
tions network that connects all the universities, research
centers and several public institutions (libraries, hospitals,
autonomous organizations of the Generalitat, etc.) and con-
nects them with the statewide academic network RedIRIS.
Supercomputers have experimented a fast technological
evolution from its creation. Thus, the performance of the new
machines has increased significantly, while the ones have
become obsolete quickly. Moreover, high performance
computers based on standard processors are consolidated
on the market and, for some applications, the rate cost/effi-
ciency is better than for vector supercomputers. Therefore,
nowadays, the division line between vector machines suit-
able for a service center like CESCA, and parallel machines
for a research center like CEPBA has disappeared. Parallel
computers used by researchers on parallelism may provide
service to researchers in other fields, as it is shown by our
acquisition of an IBM SP2 in 1995.
Consequently, it is natural to optimize the use of public re-
sources, increasing the existing cooperation between both
centers, with the purpose of facilitating the access to the
hardware and software of each center to all the researchers
in our community. The first cooperation between the two
centers in 1993 let us be selected as a Large-Scale Facility
by the EC, providing 1,7 mECU for European researchers
coming to work to Barcelona. In order to formalize this coop-
eration, FCR, CIRIT and UPC signed an agreement in
October 1995, to coordinate the activities of both centers
throught the Computing and Communications Center of
Catalonia (C4).
The C4 was created in October 1995 by CIRIT, Catalan
Research Foundation and Polytechnic University of
Catalonia. The principal objectives are to coordinate the ac-
tivities of both Catalan supercomputing centers, the
Supercomputing Center of Catalonia (CESCA) and the
European Center for Parallelism of Barcelona (CEPBA); to
facilitate the access of their resources throughout the com-
munications networks, specifically the Catalan Research
Foundation’s Scientific Ring; and to offer courses and semi-
nars to divulgate and to promote the use and benefits of the
new technologies to our community.
CESCA has dedicated its efforts to the vector computa-
tion using the high performance CRAY and IBM machines.
Of all works carried out by CESCA, we remark some activity
fields that show the diversity of the tasks undertaken: molec-
ular modelling, design of new poliamides, conformation of
metals, financial decisions, estimation of generic parame-
ters in populations, arqueometria of archaeological ceram-
ics, engineering of molecular crystals with technological in-
terest, etc. One of the projects which has been developed
with the participation of CIMNE was the aerodynamic and
hydrodynamic study of the Spanish sailing ship for the
American CUP 95. This project calculated the force exerted
by the wind on the sail under several wind power conditions
and the forces that the water bring to the keel under different
sailing situations.
Since 1991, CEPBA has as a aim the parallel computing,
an alternative to the vector one, based on the existence of a
large number of processors that works simultaneonsly.
CEPBA has leaded European initiatives of parallel technolo-
gy transfer to companies. For example, on the European
projec ESPRIT number 6753, CEPBA worked on a develop-
ment of numerical methods applied to the fluid mechanics
that was useful for the Catalan company INDO (that incor-
porated it to its own technology in the manufacture of lens)
and also for the German company BMW to the design of
cylinders formotors. In this case both companies profited by
common computing tools to develop different final aplica-
tions.
The activities of both centres have been complemented
since their creation: CESCA has been providing services to
the research groups and companies while CEPBA has been
promoting the research and development of projects based
on parallel computation. The experience of each center in its
area benefits the other so that their users have a better ser-
vice. The coordination between these two centers allows
CONTRIBUTIONS to SCIENCE, 1 (2): 245-247 (1999)
Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona
THE SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER OF CATALONIA*
* Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya (CESCA), Gran
Capità, 2-4 (Edifici Nexus), 08034 Barcelona, Catalonia (Spain). 
Tel. 34 93 205 64 64. Fax: 34 93 205 69 79.
Email: www.man@cesca.es
http: //www.cesca.es
having the human and material resources more adequated
at any moment.
The researchers use the combinated power of both cen-
ters in order to work with vectorial and parallel processors
with shared memory, superscalar processors with distrib-
uted memory, superscalar processors with shared memory
and array processors from Convex, Cray, IBM, SGI and
TMC. Their combined power is more than 50 Gflop/s.
The main objectives of the C4 are:
– The evaluation and planning of the computational
needs of the research groups to assign them the most
adequate resources between the ones available in both
centers, as well as to determine their necessities toward
the combined acquisition of hardware and software.
– The sharing of the personnal of both centers to provide
a better service to the high performance computing
community. For those who execute commercial pro-
grams the versions and platforms that gets the best
performance will be evaluated, not only for vector
processors, but also for parallel ones.
– The potentiation of the access to the high performance
computing resources and to the communicacion net-
works through the Scientific Ring. This is connected to
RedIRIS and it is coordinated with the ATM National
Host. All this infrastructure will facilitate the creation of
consortia to realize projects using both supercomput-
ing and communications technology, in the environ-
ment of the actual European programmes, as ESPRIT,
ACTS and TELEMATICS.
– The preparation of courses and seminars to divulgate
and to promote the use and benefits of the new tech-
nologies to our community.
– The creation of consortia between companies and re-
search groups to participate in high performance com-
puting R&D projects.
– The dissemination of the use and the benefits of these
technologies throughout our documental data base
(web) and the TERAFLOP magazine.
With C4 it is expected to encourage the use of supercom-
puters with the coordinates of both existent centers, follow-
ing the Research Guidelines of the Generalitat de Catalunya
(1993 – 1996) which plans to agroupate related infrastruc-
tures and researchers activities.
In summary, among its functions CESCA has to support
the research development activities of all the institutions that
need high performance computing (mainly for scientific
computation, but also for business environments that need
large databases), to manage the Scientific Ring and the
node of RedIRIS in Catalonia, and divulgate the use and
benefits of these new technologies in our community.
The projects
CESCA and CEPBA were selected in 1993 a Large-Scale
Facility, as part of the Human Capital and Mobilility (HCM)
program, to facilitate European researchers the access to
the infrastructure of both centers and the collaboration in re-
search projects to solve scientific and technological prob-
lems. In supercomputing, only the Scottish EPCC and the
Italian CINECA share with Barcelona this category. Besides,
during 1995 and 1996, CESCA and CEPBA took part in the
PECO programme, similar to HCM but aimed to Eastern
European countries. HCM has been extended with the TMR
programme (Training and Mobility of Researchers), which will
facilitate the access of European researchers to our installa-
tions till the end of 1998. These programmes have allowed up
to now that 161 researchers have visited us in 196 stays invit-
ed by 47 local research groups. The Statistical Section shows
some diagrams for these programs: the visitors by the visited
institution, by speciality, by origin country...
TMR also involves Direct (Development of an Inter-
disciplinary Round-table for Emerging Computer Technolo-
gies; 11/97 to 10/00), a concerted action of the DGXII creat-
ed as a round table which groups together computer
centres, data centres and supercomputing users, aimed to
address the role of emerging computer technologies, such
as HPCN, defining the future direction of scientific comput-
ing and the impact on Large Scale Facilities. Direct also is-
sues an on-line newsletter, Directions, which informs on the
news of the participant centres.
CESCA has also taken part in the ESPRIT projects HPCN
Europe On-line Newsmagazine (HOISe-NM), Spanish
Awareness Campaign (SAC) and the ACTS Information
Window (Infowin). HOISe-NM has created a virtual maga-
zine (Primeur) on HPCN (1996-97), and has also compiled a
list of all the Supercomputing Centres in Europe. The project
has been continued as a consortium and, up to date, the
tools for the virtual edition of the magazine are hosted at
CESCA. The SAC project, coordinated by CEPBA, has
spreaded the use of high performance technologies on
three sectors: automotive, industrial machinery and financial
(4/97 – 12/97). Infowin gave support to the ACTS project
(Advanced Communications Technologies and Services)
from 1/96 to 6/97. The project was aimed to settle a testing
ground for the innovations on the communication and data
transmission world, and has created several publications in
paper and eletronic format.
CESCA’s hardware is used by a large number of academ-
ic research projects in the fields of:
• Astrophysics, Meteorology and Climate.
• Applied Physics.
• Theoretical Physics.
• Computer Science.
• Numerical Methods in Engineering.
• Molecular Modelling.
• Theoretical Chemistry.
• Telecommunications.
• Others.
In addition to facilitating high performance computing
246 Contributions to Science
services to research groups, the Centre allows that institu-
tions and enterprises experiment with the use and benefits
of these technologies, specially in the environment of paral-
lell data bases and data mining.
CESCA also collaborates in two projects with CIRIT fi-
nancing. These projects support the molecular design re-
search infrastructure in Catalonia and reaffirm the intention
to integrate the pharmaceutical companies in the I Pla de
Recerca de la Generalitat de Catalunya. One is the creation
of the SCF, the pharmacophore search service in databases
of 3D compounds with biological interest, with the Catalyst
program. The second is the Xarxa Temàtica de
Model·lització Molecular that has been created to coordi-
nate all Catalan researchers in this field.
Communications
Communications are very important for high performance
scientific computation, because they let users access to re-
mote resources. Communications are also useful to facilitate
the development of research projects shared among people
in geografically dispersed groups.
The Centre manages the Anella Científica (Scientific
Ring), sponsored by the Fundació Catalana per a la
Recerca, the node of RedIRIS in Catalonia, sponsored by
the CICYT and the Punt Neutre d’Internet a Catalunya (CAT-
NIX), sponsored by the Comissionat per a la Societat de la
Informació. It also manages some technical resources, such
as ISDN and leased lines.
Moreover, it offers some additional services to the mem-
bers of the Scientific Network (Secondary server of the .es
domain, MBone, news, proxy-cache, mirror ftp, Remote
Access, Direct Access and S24x7) and housing and hosting
servers.
The Scientific ring
With the aim of creating a high performance communica-
tions network to connect the most important research cen-
ters of Catalonia with CESCA, the Fundació Catalana per a
la Recerca signed on April 1993 an agreement with
Telefónica to install a network, which was called Anella
Científica (Scientific Ring). The network was entirely opera-
tive in December 1993 and the transmission of information
among the different originally installed points started imme-
diately.
Phisically, the Scientific ring is based on a fiber-optic ca-
ble spread over the areas of Barcelon&eagrave; s and
Vallès by Telefónica with a transmission capability of 34
Mbps.
Catalana de Telecomunicacions Societat Operadora de
Xarxes, S.A. is the technological supplier of the Scientific
Ring, which is going to connect the institutions mentionned
above, from may 1st 1998. Telefónica has been in charge of
the installation and maintenance of the Ring for the last 5
years and until the previously mentionned data, and gently
accepted to share the management with the CTGC for one
more month in order to make the change as smooth as pos-
sible for the users.
The new Scientific Ring, instead, is based in ATM technol-
ogy upon an SDH transportation network. The switching ca-
pacity available is 6,4 Gbps and 2, 34 and 155 Mbps in the
accesses. The services that will be provided in future are:
Frame Relay at 2 Mbps, and ATM at 34 Mbps and 155
Mbps. Interworking ATM/Frame Relay will also be offered.
This network has been designed with a high MTBF, and it is
electrically protected with batteries, electric generators, and
APS and PPS protection.
The physical structure of optical fibre that supports the
new Ring is more than 90 kilometres long. Over this physical
infrastructure a transport network based on SDH technology
has been implemented. This network has 2 rings at 622
Mbps (main and secondary) with different layouts. The main
advantage this double ring offers is that it provides an alter-
native way in case of failure of the main ring, thus giving high
availability to the accesses to the Ring. The network has
been designed to optimize the bandwidth available, avoid-
ing the creation of predeterminated paths.
A big effort has been made to integrate equipment from
different vendors (for example, Fore, CISCO, Lucent
Technologies, etc.) because several connected institutions
had already bought their own devices.
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The Supercomputing Center of Catalonia

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Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert