The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) today inaugurated the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, the most advanced in Europe, which has been designed to boost research in artificial intelligence, biomedicine, climate change and computer science. The inauguration was attended by the presidents Pedro Sánchez and Pere Aragonès, which reflects the importance they give to a strategic infrastructure for the scientific community of Catalonia, of all of Spain and of the European Union as a whole.
The MareNostrum 5 is not only 23 times more powerful than its predecessor, the MareNostrum 4. It is a new supercomputer concept that integrates two complementary supercomputers in the same installation. For this innovative two-in-one design, it has been chosen as the Top Supercomputing Achievement (or Maximum Advancement in Supercomputing) in the world in 2023, according to a recognition announced at the Supercomputing Conference held in November in Denver (USA).
One of the two supercomputers, the more powerful one, technically called MareNostrum 5 ACC, has been designed specifically to boost research in artificial intelligence. The other, called MareNostrum 5 GPP, is a so-called general-purpose supercomputer, as the MareNostrum 4 already was, which means that it can be used for multiple different tasks.
“We have built it this way because it is the best way to serve supercomputing users and help solve society's problems,” declares Mateo Valero, director of the BSC, which is also the National Supercomputing Center (CNS). “We are not interested in being the fastest but rather the most useful.”
The machine occupies an area of 800 square meters, equivalent to three tennis courts, and has 160 kilometers of cables. It has been installed in the new BSC building, inaugurated two years ago on the North Campus of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). It is surrounded by enormous stained glass windows so that it can be seen by the 20,000 people who visit the BSC each year, two-thirds of whom are students from schools and institutes.
With a calculation capacity that will reach 314 petaflops (or 314,000 billion operations per second), it will multiply by 23 the capacity of MareNostrum 4, which has been the most powerful in Spain since 2017 and which has been dismantled.
The European Union has contributed 50% of the 151.4 million euros that the construction of MareNostrum 5 has cost, which will be one of the five main nodes of the EuroHPC supercomputing network. “Europe has understood that frontier science requires large computational resources and that the level of investment necessary to be able to compete on a global scale is much higher than what member states can contribute on their own,” explains Josep Maria Martorell, deputy director of the BSC. .
Spain has contributed 35% of the investment, 53 million in total, of which two thirds come from the central government and one third from the Generalitat. The remaining budget comes from Turkey (10%) and Portugal (5%), which do not have the capacity to build a supercomputer like the MareNostrum 5 and thus ensure access to supercomputing resources.
The machine is now in the testing phase and is expected to be available to the scientific community from March 1. Its use will be distributed according to investments, so that the EU will have 50% of the time of use and Spain, 35% - although Spanish researchers will end up having a higher time of use because they can opt for European calls.
The main activity of MareNostrum 5 will be research in artificial intelligence, to which 83% of its computing capacity will be dedicated, which corresponds to the 260 petaflops of the APP partition. General-purpose supercomputing will have 45.4 petaflops, or 14% of the machine's computing power. The remaining 3% will be provided by two quantum computers, one financed by Spain and the other by the EU, which will be integrated into MareNostrum 5 in 2024.
As examples of the research that will be carried out with the new supercomputer, Mateo Valero highlights climate change, since more precise simulations can be made thanks to the greater calculation capacity; biomedicine, where the BSC develops high-precision simulations of the human body, called digital twins, to move towards more personalized medicine; and green energy, where supercomputing makes it possible to simulate the turbulence generated by the mills in wind farms and improve their design.
In the latest LINPACK ranking, which classifies the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, published in November, the ACC and GPP partitions of the MareNostrum 5 have been evaluated separately. For this reason, the machine does not appear at the top of the ranking, as is usual when a new supercomputer enters service, but its two components are among the top twenty in the world, which is exceptional. The ACC dedicated to artificial intelligence is now the third most powerful supercomputer in Europe and eighth in the world. The general purpose GPP is ranked 19th in the world.
MareNostrum 5 will be the third main node of the European supercomputing network to enter service after Finland's Lumi in 2022 and Italy's Leonardo at the end of the same year, which are currently the two most powerful in Europe. It will be followed by Germany's Jupiter in 2025 and France's Jules Verne in 2026. These supercomputers are planned to operate for five years before being replaced by more advanced ones. “We have already started to think about what we want MareNostrum 6 to be like”, which should be built in 2028 to enter service in 2029, declares Mateo Valero. “Our dream is for it to be the first supercomputer built with European chips,” like those that have begun to be developed at the BSC.
“We are in a position to lead this technological revolution from the first moment” with the Perte Chip project, declared the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez. “We have the purpose of turning Catalonia and Barcelona into a European scientific reference.
The president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, has highlighted that the new supercomputer "will allow progress in European strategic autonomy and in the economic and social future of Catalonia".
The Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities, Diana Morant, and her predecessors in office Pedro Duque, now president of Hispasat, and Carmen Vela, head of scientific policy in Spain in the Mariano governments, coincided at the inauguration of MareNostrum 5. Rajoy. The three have been decisive in the development of MareNostrum 4 and 5, as Mateo Valero has publicly thanked them.
In addition to Valero, Aragonès and Sánchez, the Director General of Technology and Communication Networks of the European Commission, Roberto Viola, also participated in the opening ceremony; the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni; and the rector of the UPC, Daniel Crespo.
