Source: IFIC News

 

The artificial intelligence infrastructure Artemisa, installed at the Institute for Corpuscular Physics (IFIC), a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Valencia, has been awarded funding for the acquisition of scientific and technical equipment under the State Subprogram for Infrastructure and Scientific-Technical Equipment. This grant, co-financed by the Ministry of Science and Universities, CSIC, and IFIC, is part of the State Program for Promoting Scientific-Technical Research and Its Transfer, which aims to strengthen research capacity in centers and foster the development of advanced technologies.

Thanks to this grant, Artemisa will expand its advanced computing and data processing capabilities, establishing itself as a reference in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning applied to particle physics and other scientific disciplines. In particular, the investment will enable the acquisition of new servers with next-generation Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), as well as improvements in data storage and connectivity infrastructure. The obtained funding (€1.2M) will allow Artemisa to double its current computing capacity.

This enhancement of Artemisa’s equipment will contribute to the execution of high-impact scientific projects, facilitating data analysis in high-energy physics experiments, the development of AI models for medical research, and the study of advanced computational simulation techniques. Additionally, the improved infrastructure will encourage collaboration with other national research centers, boosting knowledge transfer and the application of AI across multiple disciplines.

“The awarding of this grant highlights the commitment of IFIC and the scientific community to the development of cutting-edge infrastructures, essential for advancing research in Spain and strengthening its position internationally,” says José Enrique García, IFIC researcher and head of Artemisa.

About the Infrastructure:

The Artemisa infrastructure was created to meet the growing need for a dedicated AI infrastructure within the Institute for Corpuscular Physics (IFIC). Although initially reserved for internal use, by 2021 the increasing academic demand for such infrastructures led to its expansion, making it available for a wide range of studies and research centers. More recently, as a fully consolidated infrastructure, its use has been extended to companies (SMEs) through the European “Digital Innovation Hub” (InnDIH) program.

Artemisa currently hosts 23 servers equipped with NVIDIA GPU Volta V100 processors, 11 servers featuring a NVIDIA Ampere A100 GPU, and a server with 8 GPUs of the same model. These servers are specifically designed for AI-related computations. In addition to these batch-processing servers, two interactive user interfaces are available for preliminary testing of programs. Furthermore, Artemisa features a state-of-the-art storage system and high-performance CPUs.