CSC has several computing resources that are available for universities and research institutes. For the geospatial community the most relevant ones are the supercomputer Puhti and the cloud computing environment. Longer introduction of using these computing resources for GIS can be found from CSC pages.
A lot of examples for using Puhti, cPouta or Notebooks service for GIS purposes. Puhti examples include both R/Python and the batch job script, also for parallel analysis.
The terms of use of Geoportti RI services are listed on the page About.
CSC Puhti
Puhti is a supercomputer with thousands of cores. It is intended for analyzing data, when a lot of computing power or data storage is needed.
Puhti provides up to thousands of cores and 1.5 TB of memory for a single analyzis, something that is not possible on desktop machines. In GIS context users in Puhti run mostly R and Python scripts, or run some pre-installed GIS software from commandline. In Puhti also a lot of Finnish spatial data is available for all users.
There are also NVidia GPUs available for programs that can harness their computing power, for example deep learning libraries.
Calculations jobs are submitted to a queue, from where the system moves them to computation when resources are freed from previous jobs.
CSC cPouta
cPouta is a cloud computing environment, where users can create virtual machines and set them up according to specific needs.
There are many different types of VMs available for various purposes. As opposed to Puhti, users gain root access to their VMs. cPouta is suitable for example for providing web services or as database server.
ePouta is similar to cPouta. The difference is that it is designed for sensitive data and meets the elevated information security level regulations.
Short instructions on how to use cPouta.
EuroHPC LUMI
LUMI is one of the most competitive and ecological supercomputers in the world, located in CSC’s data center in Kajaani, Finland. LUMI started operating in 2022.
With LUMI, researchers are able to solve completely new types of research questions with the combination of HPC, AI (especially deep learning) and high-performance data analytics to solve a single research question.
There are several GIS software available in LUMI.
LUMI’s architecture is described in detail on the LUMI website.
For information on how to access LUMI, please see the LUMI website.
CSC Mahti
Mahti is a supercomputer designed for massively parallel jobs that require large floating point performance and a capable interconnect. Mahti is in particular geared towards medium to large scale simulations.
Geospatial software
A categorized lists of common geospatial software from desktop solutions to web services.
CSC Service Catalog
To learn more about CSC services, have a look at the CSC service catalog.
