“Barcelona is once again becoming the gateway to the technological revolution,” said today the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, during the inauguration of the supercomputer MareNostrum 5, alongside the President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès; the Director-General of the European Commission for Networks, Content and Communication Technologies, Roberto Viola; and the Minister of Science, Diana Morant, among other authorities.
With a total maximum performance of 314 petaflops, which is equivalent to 314,000 trillion calculations per second and more than 380,000 high-end laptops, the MareNostrum 5, together with the Lumi (Finland) and Leonardo (Italy), forms the group of the three only pre-exascale supercomputers in Europe. Beyond its mathematical and computing operations, Sánchez emphasized that this machine will contribute to advancing the fight against diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or cancer, not to mention climate change, as well as functionalities that will help to continue leading research in artificial intelligence (AI).
He also noted that 65% of the funding that made this supercomputer possible comes from European funds. In fact, MareNostrum 5 represents the largest investment that Europe has made in a scientific infrastructure in Spain, with a total cost of 202 million euros, of which 151.4 million correspond to the acquisition of the machine itself. They have been jointly financed by the European Union’s supercomputing consortium, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, together with Spain – through the Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities and the Generalitat de Catalunya – and Turkey and Portugal (which can access a resource that they do not have in their countries).
For his part, Aragonès has agreed with Mateo Valero, director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) where the supercomputer is installed, to continue to bet on this infrastructure and be able to inaugurate, in the future, a MareNostrum 6. “The launch of the MareNostrum 5 is a step forward for Barcelona and Catalonia in terms of top-level scientific infrastructures and to advance in European strategic autonomy,” commented the president.
The capabilities and versatility of this new supercomputer are crucial to provide Europe with the most advanced technology in the field of supercomputing, accelerate the ability to research with AI, and enable new scientific advances to help solve global challenges, according to its managers.
It is a heterogeneous machine that combines two well-differentiated systems: a general-purpose partition, dedicated to classical computing, and an accelerated partition, designed to expand the frontiers of knowledge in artificial intelligence. Both systems, separately, are among the 20 most powerful supercomputers in the world, in the 19th and 8th positions respectively, making BSC the only supercomputing center in Europe with two entries among the top 20 in the so-called LINPACK ranking that classifies the 500 most powerful supercomputers on the planet.
The technology company Eviden was the selected provider after a tender to supply the new supercomputer, which also incorporates technology from other companies such as Lenovo, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia, and in whose installation the German consultancy Partec also participated. The supercomputer belongs to the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the European Joint Undertaking for High-Performance Computing that has helped finance it, a joint initiative of the EU, European countries, and private partners whose mission is to develop in Europe the largest high-performance supercomputing ecosystem in the world.
MareNostrum 5 is 23 times more powerful than its predecessor MareNostrum 4, located in a former chapel and which has been preparing for the transition for months; and about 10,000 times more than the first of the saga, MareNostrum 1, dating from 2004.
By increasing the computing power, system memory, and number of cores, MareNostrum 5 will help solve more, and more complex, problems, explained the director and other BSC managers. “We are here to help solve society’s problems,” emphasized Valero. Among these challenges, they mentioned that climate change simulations will be able to have higher resolution, moving from representing phenomena with spatial scales of hundreds of kilometers to including processes that take place on scales of a few kilometers, which will make “predictions much more precise and reliable.”
In this sense, they pointed out that, thanks to MareNostrum 5, Spain will play a key role in the European Union’s Destination Earth project, whose objective is to develop a complete virtual replica of planet Earth that allows predicting the effects of climate change, and creating and testing scenarios for more sustainable development. Similarly, much more complex problems of AI and analysis of large volumes of data can be addressed. For example, massive language models can be generated by training much larger neural networks with hundreds of billions of parameters, using data sets infinitely larger than current ones.
This represents a disruptive change in the field and opens up possibilities that were previously unthinkable, according to BSC-CNS officials. In addition to climate predictions and large language models, MareNostrum 5 is specially designed to strengthen European medical research in the design of new drugs, vaccine development, and virus spread simulations. It will also be a crucial tool for materials science and engineering, which will be able to benefit from the potential of the new supercomputer in areas such as aircraft design and optimization based on simulation and data management to achieve safer, cleaner, and more efficient aviation. Likewise, the new European supercomputer will help advance the simulation of processes for generating new forms of energy such as nuclear fusion.
The main use of this supercomputer is intended for the research of Spanish and European scientists, although companies may also have access to it under special conditions. Access to the machine will be through competitive calls and peer review evaluation, where scientists assess the work of other scientists and prioritize projects according to their importance. The distribution will depend on the investment made by the participating states and the EuroHPC JU, which will organize calls at the European level to access 50% of the available time, while the rest will be distributed among Spain, Turkey, and Portugal. In the case of Spain, access will be through calls from the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES).
MareNostrum 5 is expected to also integrate two quantum computers in the coming months. On the one hand, the first quantum computer of the RES, which is part of the Quantum Spain initiative promoted by the Ministry of Digital Transformation through the State Secretariat for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence (SEDIA). On the other hand, one of the first European quantum computers, after the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking selected BSC as one of the six centers that will host the first European network of quantum computing. Both will be among the first of this kind to be put into operation in southern Europe.
Some figures of MareNostrum 5:
• Computing power: It has a maximum computing capacity of 314 petaflops, equivalent to more than 380,000 high-end laptops.
• It is 23 times more powerful than its predecessor MareNostrum 4, and about 10,000 times more powerful than the first of the saga, MareNostrum 1.
• Its general-purpose partition is the largest in the world based on the known x86 computational architecture, with a peak performance of 45.4 petaflops.
• The accelerated partition, the third most powerful in Europe and eighth in the world, has a peak performance of 260 petaflops. It has 4,480 state-of-the-art NVIDIA Hopper100 chips. Each of them, about 8 cm2, exceeds the power of the entire MareNostrum 1 installed in 2004, which occupied the entire chapel of Torre Girona, about 180 m2, and was the fourth most powerful in the world.
• Both partitions -general-purpose partition and accelerated partition- are among the 20 most powerful supercomputers in the world, making BSC the only supercomputing center in Europe with two entries in the Top20.
• The calculations it performs in one hour would take a high-end laptop 46 years.
• The supercomputer occupies an area of about 800 m2, similar to the space occupied by three tennis courts in parallel.
• The space, over 6 meters in height, has a false floor of 120 cm for electricity and cooling, fire detection and extinction system, and air conditioning system.
• The necessary services for its operation, such as cooling, electrical transformers, etc., occupy almost three times the space that they occupied in MareNostrum 4: about 2,000 m2.
• Its copper and fiber optic cables have a total length of 160 km. Laid in a straight line, they could reach from Barcelona to Fraga (Huesca) or Perpignan in France.
• It is organized in more than 180 racks containing trays with chips, network cards, RAM memory, and hard drives.
• Its storage system could accommodate 1,280 copies of all the books cataloged throughout history.
• Its construction and adjacent space have been carried out to accommodate the approximately 20,000 people who visit the supercomputer each year. These visits also seek to promote scientific careers, especially among girls through the ‘We Are Researchers’ program.
Source: MiMub in Spanish
