In the second half of 2025, HTCondor accounted for approximately 1,215,000 CPU hours, a 36% increase over the first half of the year. For 2025 as a whole, HTCondor usage reached around 2,100,000 CPU hours, equivalent to an average of roughly 240 CPU cores running HTCondor jobs continuously throughout the year.
TeideHPC also saw substantial growth compared to the first half of 2025. CPU usage rose from 0.99 million to 1.64 million hours, while GPU usage grew from 60,000 to 90,000 hours. The annual totals for 2025 stand at 2.63 million CPU hours and 150,000 GPU hours.
Overleaf likewise experienced in 2025 a marked increase in activity relative to 2024. Two metrics are particularly telling: the monthly average number of active users (those who started at least one editing session in a given month) grew from 58.1 to 74.8, and the monthly average number of newly created projects rose from 46.2 to 73.1.
As announced early February, the new (to us) supercomputer LaPalma4 is already available to IAC researchers.
It is composed of four racks of the MareNostrum4 supercomputer previously hosted at the BSC, totaling 288 nodes and 13824 cores. This is an 10x increase in performance compared to LaPalma3!
From the user perspective, the main change is that now researchers will use their own IAC user account to login, and they will need to use two-factor authentication.
Please consult the general documentation for LaPalma4 (including how to setup the 2FA), and check the useful dashboard that shows the real-time status of the supercomputer.
If you are interested in using the system, feel free to contact us and we will setup your account on LaPalma4.
After announcing it in the last issue, we have finally launched into production the full-fledged new CAT application for the submission of observing proposals. The crucial test was the CAT 2026B call (whose deadline was April 8), for which we are happy to say that there have been no service interruptions at any time, and only minor issues were reported. The astronomical community has responded positively to the new system.
Since its launch, it has already processed more than 250 proposals (125 in the regular 2026B call) and more than 750 astronomers have registered.
We will gradually continue making improvements, and soon begin development of a complementary application to manage the scientific evaluation of proposals, and the telescope time allocation for the successful ones.
Last year, the Department of Astrophysics at the ULL acquired two NAS (Network Attached Storage) systems with a combined capacity of around 110 TB. These were originally used to copy data from BASTO ahead of its planned decommissioning, with the intention of migrating everything to a new, larger Storage Rack that the IAC was set to purchase. As that purchase was ultimately cancelled, BASTO remains operational, and the ULL NAS systems are now free for new uses.
In addition, Fernando Moreno Insertis has generously agreed to donate his Synology NAS (approximately 100 TB) to the SIE, for which we are very grateful.
After some internal discussion, we have decided to repurpose all of this storage as a backup solution for users who wish to keep a copy of their laptop data but do not have access to a project NAS. Given that the largest standard laptop disk is 2 TB, each requesting user will be allocated a quota of that size. Please be aware though that stored data will be deleted upon the end of a user's work contract and their departure from IAC.
Further details on how to request and use this space will be communicated later on.