The Computing Service Centre (CSC) is on the basement level of the future ICMAT building. It provides support for scientific computation to the ICMAT and other general purpose support to be shared with the Institute for Theoretical Physics (IFT). To this end it will have a room for large capacity continuous power supplies (CPS) and related devices, a workshop room to repair computers, and a conveniently equipped room to host PC clusters belonging to either individual researchers or to the whole institute. Moreover, it has a large format photocopying service and an independent office for the Head of the CSC.
Among the general purpose support provided by the CSC are: computing accounts (e-mail, calendar services, network registration, web publishing, and intranet), network access, software (software licensing), email, and calendar (e-mail and bulletin board system), secure computing environments, printing, scanners, photocopying, burning, faxes, web hosting (interfaces to various services and events through web), classroom facilities.
Apart from this the ICMAT has specialized staff for the maintenance of clusters belonging to its scientific staff. The role of this technical staff is the administration of these facilities: queue administration, software updates and installations, etc. The Institute already has at its disposal some computing infrastructure, the cluster ODISEA, co-financed by the Comunidad de Madrid via the project SIMUMAT. This computer has 16 nodes with 2 processors each and 4GB of RAM each. There is a double connecting network between nodes: Gigabit and Infiniband. ICMAT researchers also have access to the Supercomputer FINIS TERRAE at CESGA (Santiago de Compostela) which has been half funded by CSIC. This supercomputer is one of the largest in Europe with shared memory (almost 20000GB RAM and 2600 processors).
Depending on the needs of the specific projects developed by ICMAT researchers they will be able to obtain support from Grid Technology projects and from the Ibercivis project, both specifically designed for distributed computing.
