This year marks half a century since the establishment of the Academic Computer Centre CYFRONET AGH. The unit of the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków provides the academic community with access to the fastest computers in Poland. 

The Centre is the operator of the currently fastest supercomputer in Poland – Athena – whose theoretical computing power of 7.7 PFlops guaranteed 105th and then 113th place on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers – in June and November 2022. Athena’s power is based on servers with AMD EPYC processors and NVIDIA A100 GPGPU cards, along with the necessary data storage subsystem based on ultra-fast flash memories.

Also, the same list, in 290th and 323rd place respectively, includes the Ares supercomputer with more than 3.5 PFlops of computing power, constructed from a set of compute servers and a disk subsystem of more than 11 PB. The third of Cyfronet’s supercomputers is Prometheus, with a computing power of almost 2.7 PFlops, which has been listed on the TOP500 list 15 times in a row, with the highest 38th position, and ranked 476 in June 2022. Prometheus for science computing continuously offers more than 50,000 computing cores and GPGPU processors.

The supercomputers operating at Cyfronet are characterised by a high level of energy efficiency, which has been confirmed by their noting on the Green500 list of the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputers. In June 2022, Athena was ranked 9th in the world.

The centre manages data storage systems with a capacity of more than 70 PB, and also provides cloud services and scientific software packages. Cyfronet’s resources are available through the PLGrid Portal. Users, representing Polish scientific and research units, can use them free of charge.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński