Computing - Services for Research
Computing
High performance computing
High performance computing (HPC) means the capacity to apply tens of thousands of processing units to a single problem. An HPC system can work on a problem in parallel, which makes it more powerful than a heap of fast laptops.
CSC is hosting EuroHPC's world-class supercomputer LUMI together with a consortium of ten countries. LUMI started operating in 2022, and it is available for researchers across Europe for projects requiring extreme computing capacity. LUMI is one of the world's most competitive supercomputers and one of the most advanced platforms for artificial intelligence. It is also one of the world's most ecological supercomputers.
In addition, CSC is also hosting two national supercomputers: Puhti and Mahti. Puhti's use cases vary from interactive single core data processing to medium scale simulations, while Mahti is geared towards medium to large scale simulations.
Cloud computing
CSC offers a variety of cloud computing services: Pouta services (cPouta and ePouta) and Rahti container cloud service.
Pouta services are provided in a Infrastructure-as-a-Service model. Using Pouta services, you can can take control of your IT infrastructure, manage it in a flexible fashion, and automate it as you require. You can launch and manage virtual machines, deploy storage, and create networks for your needs. cPouta is targeted towards generic cloud needs, while ePouta is mainly used for handling sensitive data. Taking ePouta into use requires more set-up and always involves your organization's IT department.
Rahti makes the deployment of applications a breeze. This is a higher level service than Pouta services, and Rahti automatically takes care of a lot of the lower level management, so that you don't have to. Rahti is based on Red Hat's OKD, which is a distribution of Kubernetes. It uses Docker containers to run applications.