Salvador Dalí said that intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings. I think it's a great phrase to illustrate the launch of MareNostrum 5, one of the three large European supercomputers designed to serve high-level scientific research.
Today, research in some areas of biology, medicine, climate, engineering or physics is not possible without the support of large computing and data infrastructures, which already around the world are allowing many of these disciplines to give big steps forward. Thanks to these new instruments, and the progress made in the massive use of data and artificial intelligence, we are seeing scientific advances that were unimaginable a short time ago.
But science always asks us to look to the future and do so with even greater ambition. Therefore, at the same time that we installed MareNostrum 5 and said goodbye to MareNostrum 4 (in service since 2017!), we are already thinking about MareNostrum 6. It will be a great machine that should be in operation at the end of the decade, prepared to serve the challenges that scientific research will then pose to us and that, above all, will allow us to fulfill an old and ambitious dream: to fill the great European supercomputers with European technology.
Practically all of the technology that exists within MareNostrum5, and the rest of the large computers that we have in Europe, is foreign. At a time when, as Europeans, achieving greater technological autonomy is accepted as a strategic necessity, we also want to do our part. We will have achieved success if, in five years, we can write an article like this explaining that part of the technology that fills MareNostrum 6 has been designed in Europe and, even more so, if part has been made in our country.
Sometimes the word “ambition” has a negative slant. The dictionary associates it with concepts like “fame” or “power.” In the case of science it is completely the opposite. And it is because we are not talking about an economic, personal, or lucrative ambition; We are talking about a collective, academic and intellectual ambition. An ambition that aims to fulfill the duty of returning to society what society gives us, in the form of new discoveries.
Someone may find it excessive to already be thinking about MareNostrum 6 when its predecessor has barely started working. But that ambition to look to the future is essential. That we have the largest supercomputing center in Europe in Barcelona is not the result of a coincidence, but of this healthy ambition, of immense work on the part of many people, and of the unanimous and continued support for the vision that Mateo Valero had decades ago for part of the Spanish and Catalan governments, and our Polytechnic University of Catalonia. On these solid foundations, ambition has allowed us to get where we are, and now look decisively to the future.
That is why we already imagine the future MareNostrum 6 for the end of the decade, we prepare 2024 to welcome our new quantum computers and we dare to imagine how these technologies will transform research in the social and human sciences.
There is no other possible path, and we want to claim it on a day like today: a healthy ambition, to always be at the forefront of the challenges that science poses to us, and in this way serve society. There is no other possible way.
