Scientific Computing Service (SCI-uc)

Servicio de Computación Avanzada para la Investigación · University of Cantabria

Scientific Computing Service at the University of Cantabria

The Scientific Computing Service (SCI-uc) is a specialized unit of the University of Cantabria that provides advanced computing infrastructure and technical support for university research groups, research organizations, and companies involved in research and innovation. Its mission is to facilitate access to and effective use of HPC infrastructure, supporting scientific and technological work.

SCI-uc supports two infrastructure models: Hosting, where infrastructure is operated through a common SCI-uc service framework, and Housing, where research groups operate and manage their own clusters. Access for external research users and industry collaborations is subject to project application and technical validation. See the SCI-uc website for current service information.

Get Started

Task Documentation
Request an account and connect to the clusters Request access · Connection guide
Find partitions and run compute jobs Partitions · Slurm user guide · MPI jobs
Find and manage software Software Management
Choose storage or transfer data Storage · Data transfer service
Monitor resources or get help Resource monitoring · Support channels

About the Service

SCI-uc provides the following services:

  • Equipment HOUSING and infrastructure HOSTING: secure rack space, power, cooling, network connectivity, and monitoring at the 3Mares data center for research computing equipment, including externally acquired systems.
  • HPC system installation and configuration: design, deployment, and optimization of environments tailored to research projects and integrated with existing infrastructure and workflows.
  • Maintenance and technical support: continuous monitoring, maintenance, and periodic upgrades to support reliability, performance, and service continuity.
  • Specialist consulting: tailored technical solutions and advice on efficient resource use and HPC best practices.
  • Procurement advice: guidance on hardware and software acquisition, considering project performance, scalability, and budget requirements.

The 3Mares facilities are intended to provide a professionally managed, highly available environment for hosted equipment.

This documentation focuses on practical access and use. For cluster equipment, resource specifications, software, storage policies, and service procedures, use the guides linked above; these pages are maintained in their respective sections so operational details can be updated independently of this introduction.

For help with access, resources, or technical issues, contact soporte.sci@unican.es or consult the support channels.

Research Groups and Collaborating Organizations

The following list shows the research groups and collaborating organizations, together with their respective departments, that are integrated into the SCI-uc service as of January 2026:

Department of Computer Science and Electronics

Department of Earth Sciences and Condensed Matter Physics (CITIMAC)

Department of Water Science and Environmental Engineering

Department of Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences

Department of Applied Physics

Department of Economics

Department of Geography, Urban Planning and Spatial Planning

Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computing

Department of Ground and Materials Science and Engineering (DCITYM)

Institute of Physics of Cantabria (IFCA, SCIC)

Other entities

Infrastructure and Software Overview

(**) The infrastructure and software information below is current as of January 2026.

3Mares Data Center

80 m2, divided into two work areas:

  • Assembly area for equipment assembly and repair.
  • Operations area ("cold" room) with a CUBO AP system by Schneider Electric.
  • 23 IT racks.
  • Four cooling racks (InROWs) and a free-cooling system, with up to 120 kW of cooling power (70 kW free cooling).
  • Three power racks (UPS and PDUs), with up to 320 kW of electrical power.

Compute hardware

Advanced Computing Servers

  • Advanced computing clusters support research groups (Housing) and the service (Hosting), with more than 90 compute working nodes, more than 4,600 cores, and more than 15 TB RAM.
  • The inventories include systems from Intel Xeon Westmere to Emerald Rapids and AMD EPYC Zen4/Zen5, as well as two GPU nodes with two NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 GPUs.

Node and partition specifications are available in the SLURM resource reference.

Networking

  • 1/10 Gbps Ethernet networks and 200 Gbps HPC InfiniBand interconnects.

Storage

  • Lustre filesystem: more than 1.2 PB of high-performance remote storage.
  • NFS filesystem: more than 80 TB of remote home storage.
  • Local scratch (SSD/SATA): more than 100 TB.
  • NAS servers: two units with 46 TB and 64 TB for backups.

Compute software

Operating Systems

The infrastructure includes Rocky Linux 8.10 and 9.6; operating systems can vary by cluster and node.

HPC Software Environment

HPC software supports the service goals of simplifying access to the infrastructure and software environment. Availability varies by cluster and partition.

  • Slurm v24.11.3 for job scheduling.
  • Spack v0.23.0 and Lmod v8.7.65 for centrally maintained and group- or user-managed software, including GCC, Intel oneAPI, OpenMPI, Intel MPI, OpenBLAS, MKL, and HDF5 modules.
  • EESSI/2025.06, an additional software source distributed through CVMFS and exposed with Lmod on enabled nodes; it complements Spack rather than replacing it.

Infrastructure Management

  • Infrastructure management includes XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra (XOA) and Docker.
  • Monitoring is provided by Ganglia Monitor and Nagios Core.
  • The environment uses server virtualization and open-source software, and is continuously developed and updated for research needs.

For module availability and usage, see Software Management, the Spack module reference, and the EESSI user guide.