You appear in Dan Brown's Inception...
He came in 2016 and was excited to see this supercomputer installed in a chapel.
And he fictionalized it.
He novelized that there was a quantum intelligence here, moving forward in time!
He was ahead?
Yes, because it will be in 2024 when we will place a quantum computer in the Torre Girona chapel. And then, a second.
Wow!
I do it to confirm my friend Dan, heh heh.
And while... what am I seeing here?
Here, at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center –National Supercomputing Center–, in Pedralbes, we have two supercomputers. One is MareNostrum 4, which we will now cut into pieces to share with other centers in Spain...
And the other supercomputer?
I present to you MareNostrum 5: we inaugurate it today, Thursday, December 21!
I see metal cabinets down there with chips, cables, lights...
It is the successor to MareNostrum 4 (2017), MareNostrum 3 (2012), MareNostrum 2 (2006) and MareNostrum 1 (2004).
MareNostrum 5... is it much better than 4?
Very much. Some of its Hopper chips, from NVIDIA, are the fastest in the world for AI. Each of these chips (8 cm2 of surface) is more powerful than the entire MareNostrum 1! Look, MareNostrum 5, with 315 petaflots, is almost 10,000 times more powerful than MareNostrum 1.
Sorry, but... what is a petaflop?
10 to the power of 15 operations/second.
And what will come next?
MareNostrum 6 will arrive, in turn ten times faster than MN5, maybe fifteen. A speed of three exaflops, or four.
What is an exaflop?
10 to the power of 18: one trillion operations per second.
A trillion... And what will it depend on whether it is three or four exaflops?
About money: the more money, the more power!
How much does MareNostrum 5 cost?
It costs 207 million euros: the machine alone is 151 million, and then there is the electricity, the data...
Who provides all that money?
The European Union contributes 50%: it is the highest investment in scientific infrastructure that Europe has ever made in Spain.
And the rest of the money?
Spain, 34% (between the central government and the Generalitat); Türkiye, 10%; Portugal, 6%.
Don Mateo, I forgot to ask you what a quantum computer is...
Use qbits, not bits: it will run some applications much faster than conventional computers.
And why do we want so much speed?
To save time (and money) when designing drugs. Or vaccines. Or wind turbines. Or classify types of cancer and allow their cure. Or to model cars, or airplanes, without physical wind tunnels: digital ones are enough.
In what more areas will supercomputation be useful to us?
In creating digital twins, either of the Earth or of the human body. In the Destination Earth project, for example, we will generate a digital twin of the planetary climate, to adapt to climate change in real time.
Is the planet warming?
It's warming up pretty quickly, and it's the biggest problem facing humanity today.
What else will supercomputing help us with?
It will help us build smart cities: we can predict fluctuations in road mobility and air quality every ten meters.
Summarize the role that supercomputers play for humanity.
It is one of the most useful tools today for the advancement of science. As was the microscope for Ramón y Cajal.
And so we come to artificial intelligence, but... how did all this start?
The IBM Deep Blue computer playing chess against Miquel Illescas, back in 1995: it was a match we organized in Barcelona... and then the AI lost! But he won already in 1997 playing against Kasparov. And so on until ChatGPT arrives.
Are you scared of artificial intelligence?
It is a dual-use technology and that is why we should regulate it, but I see that it will cost... Europe is in it these days.
And meanwhile...
We will be able to do everything that any of us could have imagined before, as Jules Verne said. For example, we can create a digital twin of the human brain, and one that even surpasses its capabilities... Why not?
