Presentation of the update of the Caesaraugusta IV supercomputer, located at the BIFI Institute of Unizar.

This event was held in the BIFI assembly hall on the Río Ebro campus and was attended by Rosa Bolea, acting vice-rector for Science Policy; Pilar Gayán, director general for Science and Research; Mar Paños de Arriba, director general for Industrial Promotion and Innovation; Yamir Moreno, director of the BIFI; Alfonso Tarancón, director of CESAR; David Iñiguez, head of the Computing and Science Area of the BIFI; Alfonso Tarancón, director of CESAR; David Iñiguez, head of the Computing and Data Science Area of BIFI and Francisco Rubio, director of ARAID. This upgrade of CESAR IV, a node of the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES), will accelerate the calculation of numerous applications such as molecular dynamics, drug design, materials science and AI.

The BIFI University Research Institute presented on 23 January 2025 a new state-of-the-art hardware, GPUs for Artificial Intelligence, which will enable more efficient HPC and AI services, which previously could not be realised. The programme included expert talks, as well as a visit to Caesaraugusta IV.

The Agustina and RasmIA supercomputers are part of Caesaraugusta IV and provide intensive computing power to scientists throughout Spain and Europe, as well as to collaborative projects with companies and public administrations.

This update will enable the GPU processors to take advantage of their capabilities, providing a huge increase in computing power with a better performance-to-power ratio.

GPUs can accelerate computation in many applications such as molecular dynamics, drug design, materials science, etc., but are vital for Artificial Intelligence.

These GPUs are integrated into the new RasmIA supercomputer, giving it the capabilities to work with the Large Language Models (LLM) needed to develop applications in the field of Natural Language Processing, which will be crucial in the coming years.

The first phase of the upgrade of Caesaraugusta IV, a node of the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES) at the University of Zaragoza, was presented at the end of 2023 with the installation of the Agustina supercomputer, based on CPU processors and with a computing power of around 500 TFLOPS. At the end of 2024, the second phase of this upgrade was completed with the installation of a second supercomputer, christened RasmIA and based on latest-generation GPU processors of the H100 and L40S type which, thanks to the vector capacity of these chips, allows an 8-fold increase in the computing power of the previous phase.

The total investment for both phases is €2,200,000 and is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR.

The new supercomputer consists of 3 nodes with a total of 12 Nvidia H100 GPUs specialised in Artificial Intelligence computations and 9 nodes with a total of 36 Nvidia L40S GPUs, with exceptional performance in certain high performance computing applications.