About BIFI

It is financially supported by the Government of Aragón and the University of Zaragoza, and works in close collaboration with other research institutes of the University and the wider region. Over the years, the Institute has earned broad recognition from the scientific community in Spain and abroad. Its maturity and growth are reflected in several indicators: today it hosts one of the largest computer clusters in Spain, has organized numerous international and national scientific meetings, and has secured competitive research projects funded by both Spain and the European Union. In recognition of its outstanding trajectory, the Institute received in 2023 the Aragón Investiga Award, the highest institutional distinction granted by the Government of Aragón. BIFI is a multidisciplinary research center where biologists, physicists, computer scientists, and mathematicians work together, sharing the tools of their respective fields and incorporating new perspectives inspired by the emerging theory of complex systems.

An important part of BIFI’s computing resources is hosted in the Supercomputing Laboratory, which operates several high-performance computing platforms. The most prominent system today is Agustina, the current HPC supercomputer of the Centro de Supercomputación de Aragón (CESAR). Agustina is an ICTS node of the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES) and provides state-of-the-art High Performance Computing and Cloud Computing infrastructures for researchers and companies. The system comprises 6,144 AMD EPYC 7513 cores, 25.4 TB of RAM, high-speed InfiniBand 100 Gbps interconnects, and 500 TB of storage under Lustre. It reaches a peak performance of 511 TFLOPS and uses an energy-efficient InRow water-cooling system. Recent extensions include dedicated GPU nodes featuring 12 NVIDIA H100 GPUs (80 GB) and 36 NVIDIA L40S GPUs (48 GB), each set distributed across high-memory nodes, significantly boosting the center’s capabilities in AI, simulation, and data analytics.BIFI manages CESAR and provides user support, training, and access procedures.

The University of Zaragoza, located in the capital of the Autonomous Community of Aragón, was founded in 1474 and is one of the oldest universities in the world. The University is the main centre of technological innovation in the Ebro Valley and has over 40.000 students in its faculties.