Yuca works with an open source system for researchers

On the national supercomputing map, the supercluster Yuccawhich is housed in the High Performance Computing Area of ​​the University of Sonora (Acarus), is the supercomputing and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure with the greatest capacity in the country since its launch in May 2025.

“Yucca It is currently the largest supercomputer in the country, it is the newest, which far surpasses others that we have in Mexico, which are barely half petaflop“said Lukas Nellen Filla, researcher at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

With a capacity of 2.3 petaflopscan perform 2.3 billion operations per second, which can cut decades of investigative work.

The equipment acquired with resources from the Ministry of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (Secihti) is available to researchers who, as part of their academic projects, require high calculation and simulation capabilities in various areas of knowledge, such as physics, mathematics, computational chemistry, and astrophysics, among others.

According to the official site of the University of Sonora, Yucca operates through the Open on Demand system, an open source web portal that allows students and researchers to access high performance computing (HPC) resources through a browser.

More than 300 thousand hours of use

In its first five months of operations, Yucca It has provided service to 108 researchers with their respective work teams and has used more than 300 thousand hours of computing, which would be equivalent to about 70 years of human work.

Another fact that reflects his capacity is that, in less than a semester, only for the mathematics department, he has carried out a total of 457,277 hours of calculations, which on a conventional CPU would represent 52 years of continuous work.

So that Yucca To come into operation in 2025, almost 68 million pesos were allocated, of which nearly 60 million were used for the acquisition of the equipment, with most of the investment made in 2024.

To be a user of Acarus, and have access to the supercomputing infrastructure, you must have a research project that demands high-performance computing and fill out a form. In addition, basic, intermediate and advanced level courses are offered to learn how to use the system.

However, specialists such as Nellen Filla warn that the challenge is not only to have higher power equipment, but to articulate its use in a national network that allows sharing capabilities and ensuring sustained use of these infrastructures.