The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) has begun the installation of the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, which should come into service in the middle of the year and which will have a computing capacity more than twenty times greater than its predecessor, the MareNostrum 4.
The new machine will be one of the five main nodes of the European EuroHPC supercomputing network, which the European Union launched in 2018 with the aim of ensuring that Europe does not lag behind the United States and China in a strategic technology.
For the local ecosystem of Catalonia and for Spain as a whole, MareNostrum 5 is also strategically important for promoting scientific research and innovation in companies. Not surprisingly, the BSC is officially the National Supercomputing Center and is the main node of the Spanish Supercomputing Network, made up of 16 supercomputers distributed in 11 communities.
“MareNostrum 5 definitely positions us as one of the leading supercomputing places in Europe. If we do things right, ten years from now we will continue to have competitive supercomputers in the five places that we have been chosen as main nodes of the EuroHPC network”, declares Josep Maria Martorell, deputy director of the BSC. “Becoming a European infrastructure guarantees us long-term sustainability.”
The MareNostrum 5 will require a total investment of around 220 million euros. Of these, 151 are for the purchase and installation of the machine’s components and approximately 70, for the operating costs until 2028, when it is planned to replace it with another, more advanced supercomputer. Spain will contribute 23.33% of these 220 million; Catalonia, another 11.66%; the remaining 65% will be covered by European funds.
The MareNostrum, which enters service this year, will have a maximum computing capacity of 314 petaflops (or billions of trillion operations per second). This capacity multiplies by 23 the 13.9 petaflops of its predecessor, the MareNostrum 4, which since 2017 has been the most powerful supercomputer in Spain.
The overall return on investment is difficult to specify since it is distributed among users from the scientific community and the business sector, and because most of the returns are in the medium and long term, says Martorell. But different types of data report on the return on investment.
Thirty-seven companies currently have contracts with the BSC for research projects in which supercomputing is applied to solve specific problems. For example, Seat has used the calculation capacity of the MareNostrum 4 to understand the air flows caused by the turning of the wheels of the cars.
Another 280 companies work with the BSC in the framework of research consortia that include more participants, usually to address broader problems. Eleven new companies have emerged from BSC itself as spinoffs and 31 patents, some of them still in the approval process.
Most of the companies that resort to supercomputing are from the energy, transport, biomedicine and computer technology sectors, reports Mateo Valero, director of the BSC. Valero recalls that “80% of the capacity of the MareNostrum is allocated to users external to the BSC; we only use 20%”.
At this moment, “two out of every three requests for use of the MareNostrum 4 have to be rejected because we do not have sufficient computing capacity to attend to all of them,” reports Martorell. “With the new supercomputer we will be able to tackle scientific problems that are beyond the reach of the current machine, and we also hope to be able to serve a greater number of users who can benefit from supercomputing.”
The scientific production of the BSC is also headed by computing technologies (which form part of 52% of the works published by BSC researchers) and biomedicine (18%), areas in which scientific advances are the seeds of new products and companies.
To all this we must add the less tangible return of personnel training, Valero and Martorell point out. The BSC staff is currently made up of 787 people, 50% more than in 2017 and double that of 2014. They are young staff, with an average age of 35, and one in three are foreigners. Every year about 200 new ones enter and about 150 leave.
“Our model has a high turnover of professionals; it is the way to transfer well-trained personnel to our environment”, explains Martorell. Of those who leave, two thirds remain in Spain, the majority in the Barcelona area. Approximately half goes to the academic sector and the other half to companies.
“In the coming years there will be a great demand for people with this profile in many sectors,” says Valero. “If we are leaders in Europe in supercomputing, we will also be leaders in the training of highly qualified personnel for our companies.”
