Barcelona lights up MareNostrum 5, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world

2023-12-21 11:56:11

Predict the effects of climate change, design new drugs or develop control systems. artificial intelligence (AI) cutting-edge. A supercomputer it’s a computer capable of carrying out operations like these, much more complex than those that common devices can undertake. That is the mission of Barcelona Supercomputing Center – National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), which this Thursday launched the brand new MareNostrum 5its most advanced version.

“It is a technological prodigy,” he celebrated. Pedro Sanchez. “It will allow Catalonia and Barcelona to become the scientific capital of Europe, and that is good for Spain.” The president of the Spanish Government has visited the BSC facilities accompanied by the ‘president’ of the Generalitat, Peter Aragonés, who has been called upon to find solutions to shared problems. The Spanish Minister of Science and Innovation also participated in the visit, Diana Morantthe mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboniand the Catalan ‘adviser’ for Research and Universities, Joaquim Nadal.

In June 2019, the BSC presented its project to guarantee the strategic autonomy of the European Union (EU) in technological matters. MareNostrum 5 was supposed to be released at the end of 2020, but the outbreak of the covid pandemic delayed everything. Three years later, the most powerful exascale processor in Spain has started to walk.

Technological power

The MareNostrum 5 is the latest generation of the saga of superordinates promoted in the Catalan capital since 2004. If its previous version, the MareNostrum 4, could perform 14,000 billion operations per second, its new device shoots up its maximum capacity to 314,000 billion calculations per second. The BSC machine calculates in one hour what a medium-high-end laptop would take up to 46 years to complete. “It has scientific and technology transfer power that makes it unique in Europe,” he explained. Mateo Valerodirector and promoter of the BSC-CNS.

The project will have a total cost of 202 million euros, which includes both the purchase and installation of MareNostrum 5 and the next five years of operation. Spain leads the consortium that, together with Portugal and Turkey, will contribute 50% of the investment. The other half will be financed with European funds from UE. This makes MareNostrum 5 the largest European investment in Spain in a scientific infrastructure.

Scientific push

This technological leap makes this supercomputer one of the most powerful in the world, a crucial tool for investigation to “seek answers to the big questions of the science“.

The MareNostrum 5 will help create ‘digital twins‘ of the Earth and the human body, virtual replicas to simulate hypothetical future scenarios with all their complexity. This will make it possible to anticipate the challenges of the global warming and better understand our biology y genetics to advance the medicine and find solutions to diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer’s, “perhaps the biggest challenge we have worldwide,” according to Valero.

This method, which requires increasingly greater power, has already begun to be applied in Barcelona to improve urban decision-making.

The BSC also contemplates that its creation will serve to streamline the design and manufacturing of semiconductors Europeans, a strategic priority of Brussels. “Europe cannot lose that opportunity because perhaps it is the only one to achieve technological sovereignty,” Valero warned. “We are at the beginning of a revolution,” added Roberto Viola, general director of the General Directorate of Communication, Networks, Content and Technology of the European Comissionwho has celebrated reducing distances with the United States and China in the field of supercomputing.

MareNostrum 5 will also help advance the generation of new energies such as nuclear fusion and to optimize aviation aerodynamics. The leap in the computing power of this supercomputer will allow it to process and store hundreds of billions of datathus opening the door to the development of neural networks more complex than those that have become popular with the emergence of ChatGPT.

Unique infrastructure

The MareNostrum 5 is divided into two different systems: one dedicated to the computing classical and another that seeks to “expand the frontiers of knowledge” of the IA, increasingly widespread. The first partition is the largest in the world based on the x86 computing architecture, while the second is the third most powerful in Europe and the eighth most powerful in the world.

In the coming months, in addition, MareNostrum 5 will integrate two quantum computers, the first in operation in the south of the old continent. These will be located in the Girona Towera 19th-century neoclassical chapel that has been home to MareNostrum 4.

Related news

This two-headed architecture, “ideal” according to Valero, makes the BSC the only supercomputing center on the continent that is placed twice on the lists of the 20 most powerful on the planet. The up to eight columns of servers that make up this new supercomputer occupy an area of ​​up to 800m2, equivalent to three tennis courts.

The BSC is a public consortium born from the institutional collaboration between the Government of Spain, the Generalitat of Catalonia and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. More than 1,000 people work in this advanced technology center and in the development of a supercomputer destined to represent a great leap for scientific research.