IHCantabria inaugurates “Galerna” its new, more efficient and sustainable supercomputing infrastructure

The new supercomputing infrastructure will make it possible to tackle more complex simulations, process larger volumes of data and significantly reduce the computational times required in the simulations of its research projects.

The Environmental Hydraulics Institute of Cantabria (IHCantabria) launches its new supercomputing cluster, a high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. This technological platform is designed to support the increasingly demanding computational requirements of the scientific activity developed at IHCantabria.

Galerna is the name chosen by the staff of IHCantabria, among a total of more than sixty proposals, for the new cluster that represents for the institute an important technological leap with respect to the previous infrastructure. The investment of more than one million euros in this infrastructure underlines IHCantabria’s firm commitment to digitalization and AI.

The newly released supercomputing cluster is composed of 32 compute nodes, distributed among 26 general purpose CPU nodes, 2 high memory nodes, 2 GPU-accelerated nodes and 2 visualization nodes. Galerna’s infrastructure has more than 6000 processing cores, approximately 30 TB of RAM and a 3 Petabytes high performance storage environment based on parallel technology, capable of handling large volumes of information and providing efficient access to data during job execution.

Galerna’s capabilities also include GPU-accelerated computing resources for artificial intelligence applications, advanced data analysis and computationally demanding numerical models.

The system also incorporates a very high-speed interconnection network, together with advanced management tools, job planning and high availability, allowing efficient and shared use of resources by the different research groups.

Compared to the previous cluster, Galerna represents a significant improvement in computational capacity, flexibility and specialization. The increase in the number of available cores, the increase in memory, the incorporation of new GPU resources and the improvement of the storage system will allow IHCantabria to run more complex simulations, work with larger data sets and reduce project execution times.

Improvement over the previous Neptune cluster

• +14 years of technological evolution
• Up to 4.7× more cores
• 13× more computing power
• More than 7× available memory
• Up to 11× more storage capacity
• New high memory node capacity
• AI-oriented GPU platform
• 3.6× more network bandwidth
• Next-generation parallel storage
• Advanced remote viewing and access
• Automated and growth-ready infrastructure
• Increased energy efficiency and sustainability

“Equipment under research grant EQC2024-008548-P co-financed by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ERDF, EU.”