The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) yesterday inaugurated the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, the most advanced in Europe, which has been designed to promote research in artificial intelligence, biomedicine, climate change and computer science. The inauguration was attended by presidents Pedro Sánchez and Pere Aragonès, which reflects the importance they attach to this strategic infrastructure for the scientific community in Catalonia, throughout Spain and Europe as a whole.
Not only is the MareNostrum 5 twenty-three times more powerful than its predecessor, the MareNostrum 4, it is also a new supercomputer concept that integrates two complementary supercomputers into one facility. For this innovative design, it has been chosen as the top supercomputing achievement in the world in 2023.
The more powerful of the two supercomputers, technically called ACC, has been designed to boost research in artificial intelligence. The other, called GPP, is a general-purpose supercomputer, like the MareNostrum 4, which means it can be used for different tasks.
“We built it this way because it’s the best way to serve supercomputing users and help solve society’s problems,” says Mateo Valero, director of the BSC. “We are not interested in being the fastest but the most useful”.
The machine, which occupies an area of ??800 square meters and has 160 kilometers of cables, has been installed in the BSC building on the North campus of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. It is surrounded by huge glass windows so that it can be seen by the 20,000 people who visit the BSC every year, two-thirds of whom are students from schools and institutes.
With a calculation capacity that will reach 314 petaflops (or 314,000 trillion operations per second), it will multiply by twenty-three 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 has cost the construction of MareNostrum 5, which will be one of the five main nodes of the EuroHPC supercomputing network. “Europe has understood that frontier science needs large computational resources and that the level of investment necessary to compete on a global scale is much higher than what the member states can contribute on their own”, explains Josep Maria Martorell, associate director of the BSC .
Spain has contributed around 35% of the investment, 53 million in total; two thirds come from the central government, and the other from the Generalitat. The remaining budget comes from Turkey (nearly 10%) and Portugal (5%), which thus ensure access to supercomputing resources.
The machine is in the testing phase and is expected to be available to the scientific community from March 1. The use will be distributed according to the investments, so that the EU will have 50% of the time of use, and Spain, 35%.
Its main activity will be research in artificial intelligence, to which 83% of the calculation capacity will be dedicated, which corresponds to the 260 petaflops of the APP partition. The general-purpose supercomputing will have 45.4 petaflops, or 14% of the machine’s computing power. Two quantum computers that will be integrated into the supercomputer in 2024 will contribute the remaining 3%.
As examples of the research that will be done with the MareNostrum 5, Mateo Valero highlights the field of climate change, because it will be possible to make more precise simulations thanks to the greater calculation capacity; biomedicine, in which the BSC develops high-precision simulations of the human body to move towards more personalized medicine, and green energy, for example by simulating the turbulence generated by windmills in wind farms in order to improve their design .
In the latest Linpack ranking, which ranks the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, and which was published in November, the ACC and GPP partitions of the MareNostrum 5 were evaluated separately. That is why the machine does not appear at the top of the ranking, as is usual when a new supercomputer enters service, but both components are in the top twenty in the world, which is exceptional. The ACC is now the third most powerful supercomputer in Europe and eighth in the world. The GPP is ranked 19th in the world.
MareNostrum 5 will be the third main node of the European supercomputing network, after Finland’s Lumi and Italy’s Leonardo, which entered service in 2022. It will be followed by Germany’s Jupiter in 2025 and France’s Jules Verne in 2026. Each of these supercomputers is expected to operate for five years. “We have already started thinking about how we want the MareNostrum 6 to be”, which should be built in 2028 to enter service in 2029, says 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 very beginning” with the Perte Chip project, Pedro Sánchez declared yesterday. Pere Aragonès emphasized that the new supercomputer “will allow progress in European strategic autonomy and in the economic and social future of Catalonia”.
At the inauguration of MareNostrum 5, the Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities, Diana Morant, and her predecessors in office, Pedro Duque, now president of Hispasat, and Carmen Vela, responsible for scientific policy in the governments of Mariano Rajoy Mateo Valero thanked the three, who have been decisive in the development of the MareNostrum 4 and 5.