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A few days ago we were able to enjoy a guided tour of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), where we were shown the MareNostrum 5, the most advanced supercomputer in Europe and where I made this photographic report for Photos from La Vanguardia Readers.
This is a scientific facility and public research center located in the Girona Tower in Barcelona, on the North Campus of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
The largest European investment in scientific infrastructure in Spain arrived three years late, mainly due to the pandemic, but it is already here and has managed to sneak into the top ten most powerful supercomputers in the world.
In December 2023, the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer was inaugurated, with a performance 18 times higher than MareNostrum 4. Its goal is to reach 200 petaflops (200,000 trillion operations per second). It also has a storage capacity of 248 petabytes, unique in the world.
The total investment has been about 203 million euros, of which 150 were allocated to the installation of the supercomputer and the rest to keep it in operation for five years (it uses a lot of energy). Spain has contributed 70 million euros, while the rest comes from Portugal, Turkey and the European Commission.
It is the national supercomputing center in Spain in charge of managing the MareNostrum supercomputers. As a service center, it has different supercomputers and high-capacity data repositories.
It is at the service of the international scientific community and industry that require high-performance computing (HPC) services.
Its multidisciplinary research team and computational facilities - including MareNostrum - make the BSC-CNS an international center of excellence in e-Science.
The research focuses on four fields: Computational Sciences, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences and Computational Applications in Science and Engineering. The lines of research are developed within the framework of EU research funding programs, Spanish and Catalan public research calls and collaborations with leading companies.
During these five years, MareNostrum 5 will help multiple investigations such as the development of AI, the search for treatments for diseases, optimizing the aerodynamics of airplanes or analyzing global warming.
And as its director says, "Barcelona is on the world map of supercomputing like a big thumbtack."
