It was the beginning of the 19th century when the Girona family, a family from the Catalan bourgeoisie that had made money from trade and industry, bought several pieces of land in Barcelona, specifically the Les Corts area, which is now the Pedralbes neighborhood. A few years later, in 1857, they built a palace in front of an extensive garden that included a colorful lake. It was also a devout family, so they also built a large chapel next to the main house. Little did they imagine that those imitation Romanesque walls, arches and stained glass windows would end up desecrated a century and a half later, albeit for a good cause: housing a machine capable of containing all the knowledge of the time, performing the calculations of its extensive properties in the blink of an eye or generate a double of the Earth that could predict the drift of the world (renamed ‘climate change’), even the Apocalypse. Because what is now known as Torre Girona has been the home for years of MareNostrum 4 , one of the most powerful computers in the world capable of performing tasks in seconds that would take our desktops years. «MareNostrum 4 is, at the moment, the most powerful supercomputer in the country. This machine has served both public and private research in fields as diverse as cosmology, climate change, life sciences or developments in engineering”, explains Francisco Doblas, director, in front of the window that houses it. from the Department of Earth Sciences of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), on which MareNostrum depends. Behind, the lights blink inside the different towers or cabinets (called racks), which house the nodes, which are something like independent computers working together, which gives this class of computers their ‘superpowers’. The first version, launched in 2004, was the most powerful computer in Europe at the time. However, times pass for everyone, including supercomputers, which in a matter of years become obsolete. The MareNostrum 4 seen in a view from the second floor of the chapel. In the image you can see the cabinets or ‘racks’ that make up the PEP DALMAU supercomputer The same has happened with MareNostrum 4, which despite having a maximum power of 13 petaflops (petaflops measure the power of supercomputers and one is equivalent, in a simplified way, at a thousand trillion operations per second), will soon take over from its fifth version, twenty times more powerful and three times larger (it will reach 314 petaflops, surpassing the giant IBM Summit, which for years has been the supercomputer most powerful in the world). At the bottom of the image you can see the chapel in which the MareNostrum 4 is installed; the central walkway connects you to the new building, gray in color and much more modern in appearance, which will house MareNostrum 5. On the left, the rectory of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and the former home of the Girona family PEP DALMAU Doblas is one of the scientists who is looking forward to this new ‘monster’, which will have an investment of around 100 million euros from the European Union, to start operating next July. Because MareNostrum 5 will allow further investigation into tools such as digital twins. These systems help build various what-if scenarios and make predictions, integrating data from multiple sources in real time. This is already being done with the city of Barcelona, where thanks to the BSC project in collaboration with the Municipal Institute of Informatics (IMI) and Barcelona Regional (BR) it has been possible to see, for example, the coverage within a 10-minute walk from metro stops, before and after the opening of the future lines L8 and L9. A digital Earth However, Doblas’s project is much more ambitious: his intention is to create a digital twin of the Earth, the first of its kind. «It is a tool that will allow us not only to make models to predict, for example, the climate system of our planet; it also allows for interactivity.” Because this twin will collect such extensive data that it will make it possible to monitor and predict the state of health of the planet, taking into account the effects of climate change and the evolution of the oceans, atmosphere, and forests. Not only that: it will also serve to evaluate the effectiveness and impact of environmental public policies, both on a large scale and in a much more concentrated way. “This twin will allow you to ask more specific questions, such as whether the area where a certain company plans to plant a vineyard will suffer from climate change,” says Doblas. Digital twins will also make it possible, in the future, to create virtual replicas of ourselves that will reveal how treatments affect us as a whole; testing new drugs without the need for animals; or not having to face ethical dilemmas when carrying out certain clinical trials. “That is our future, although, for the moment, we are capable of reproducing only some parts of the body,” explains Alba Jené, scientific coordinator of the Department of Life Sciences. Her team works generating models of, for example, how lung tissue behaves during a disease like Covid or how the brain behaves after a tumor. “Then we interact with them, observing how they evolve or how different drugs affect them,” she says. The team is creating a database with the clinical histories of many patients (although always ensuring their anonymity) from the entities with which they collaborate to, with the power of MareNostrum, extract patterns. “The objective is to obtain knowledge to feed databases and decision support systems, giving the doctor a new tool to help diagnose.” From MareNostrum 4, the MarIA project has also emerged, an artificial intelligence that ‘thinks’ in Spanish thanks to the fact that it has been trained with 135,000 million entries extracted from texts from the National Library. MarIA can understand and write in our language, and has placed it in third place among the languages that have massive open access models, only surpassed by English and Mandarin. “Behind any application that uses natural language, such as the email spam filter or the WhatsApp word predictor, there is one or another language model, such as MarIA,” says Marta Villegas, BSC researcher and project coordinator, which explains that this artificial intelligence has been used for document classification, identification of identities in texts or for automatic translation. And this artificial intelligence does not stop growing. Now a multilingual MarIA GPT is being tested and whose objective is that all the languages of Spain are well represented. They are also looking forward to MareNostrum 5, because it will be a “very important qualitative leap” that will allow, among other things, to create ChatGPT, the famous program capable of chatting like a real person. The future of the chapel But what will happen to MareNostrum 4 and the chapel facilities? It is still not entirely clear, but the place is being considered as the home of the new quantum computers. These are computers that, in the future, will exponentially surpass the data processing of the most advanced supercomputers (including MareNostrum 5) and will be able to solve tasks in seconds that previously took not days, not months, but millions of years. However, it is still a technology ‘in its infancy’ that physicists are struggling to control. Quantum Spain was born from this need, promoted by the Ministry of Economy. “The basis of this program is to install and operate with a real quantum computer here in Spain,” explains Alba Cervera, a BSC researcher and project coordinator, “and that scientists can start testing this technology now that we are beginning to know how it works.” ». MORE INFORMATION noticia No What is the use of the water found on the Moon noticia No Victor Glover, the first black astronaut to go to the Moon: “In the beginning they were all the same, soldiers, thirty-somethings and whites” And although all this may sound like a dystopian future, Cervera clarifies: «We will not need a desktop quantum computer in the same way that we do not need a supercomputer to send an email». Nor did the Girona imagine what their chapel would become…
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