PIC description

Introduction

The Port d’Informació Científica (PIC) is a scientific-technological data centre and research infrastructure located on the campus of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), in Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain. It is operated through a collaboration agreement between the Institut de Física d’Altes Energies (IFAE) and the Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas (CIEMAT). PIC specialises in the storage, processing and analysis of large scientific datasets and provides advanced computing and data services to the national and international research community.

PIC is part of the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES), a distributed Singular Scientific and Technical Infrastructure (ICTS), and offers high-performance computing resources, data management services, and support for multidisciplinary scientific projects.

PIC plays a key role in data-intensive scientific endeavours including:

• Serving as a Tier-1 data centre for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), supporting data processing for the ATLAS, CMS and LHCb experiments at CERN.
• Hosting the main data centres for the MAGIC gamma-ray telescopes and the PAU Survey instruments.
• Operating as one of the data centres for the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission and as a scientific data centre in the mission’s Science Ground Segment.
• Providing tools and platforms for data exploration and analysis such as CosmoHub, which enables interactive access to large cosmological and astrophysical datasets.

With a team of scientists, engineers and computing experts, PIC’s mission is to accelerate research by enabling effective data-oriented workflows, from interactive development to large-scale production computing and analysis.