At the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) they are used to making excessive technological leaps. “The MareNostrum 5 is 30 times faster than the MareNostrum 4 and 10,000 times faster than the MareNostrum 1,” says its director, Mateo Valero, via videoconference. It is difficult to assimilate. He tells it as if it were the most natural thing, what can be expected. He inhabits a world that works with other figures. The MareNostrum are the supercomputers that this research center, a leading global leader, has developed from the first, in 2005, to the fifth, which opens on December 21 and will serve science in crucial challenges: from projection from climate change to the development of digital twins—simulators—of the human body for medical purposes, including other issues as diverse and valuable as, for example, the refinement of the linguistic capacity of artificial intelligence or the improvement of urban planning interventions. Valero remembers that, when they were starting, a foreign colleague told him: “We can all have our hour of glory.” Two decades later, the BSC has grown from a staff of a few dozen to nearly a thousand. And it has established itself as one of the five main supercomputing centers in Europe. “It seems that we have survived,” the person in charge ironically says.
Valero, a computing pioneer in Spain, explains that the formidable pace of improvement of these megamachines is due to the fact that the speed of the processors – the basic functional units of computers – has been increasing from year to year and, at the same time , to the ability, also increasing, to make massive quantities of them work together.
The MareNostrum 5 has a maximum computing power of 314,000 trillion operations per second. It is among the largest and most powerful supercomputers in the world, according to Linpack's Top 500 benchmark ranking. However, it has not been designed to beat technical records, but to be as functional as possible for research, as its chief engineer, Sergi Girona, emphasizes: “Our goal was not to have the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Our purpose is to help solve the most complex scientific problems. And if we value it this way, in terms of service to the scientific community, we believe that ours is the best, most complete and versatile in the world.”
The machine combines two systems, “a partition dedicated to classical computing and an accelerated partition.” The latter will be dedicated to projects that use artificial intelligence, with 4,480 next-generation Nvidia Hopper processors. Each of these chips has more than twice the power of the entire MareNostrum 1, which in 2005, when it came into operation, was the fourth fastest there was.
MareNostrum 5 has represented the largest European investment in a scientific infrastructure in Spain. Its total cost has been 207 million euros, 151 from the development of the machine and another 56 related to its energy consumption and its maintenance over the next five years. 50% is financed by the European Commission and the other 50% has been assumed, in different proportions, by the basic public consortium of the BSC-National Supercomputing Center, formed by the Government of Spain, the Generalitat and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia , plus two other countries that are part of the project, Portugal and Turkey.
Just about to launch the MareNostrum 5, it is already expected that in five years there will be a new model, the MareNostrum 6. Valero specifies that this is the time it takes for these machines to become “obsolete”. On the screen, he shows a notebook that accompanies him and in which he makes notes for the next supercomputer. For this challenge, he warns, the key will not be so much technical power as, we could say, strategic independence. “The challenge is for Europe to design its chips, and we have set out to realize this dream, for the first time, with the MareNostrum 6 technology.”
The project at number 5, which occupies a room of about 900 square meters in which more than 180 computer cabinets (racks) are distributed, began in 2017 with the search for financing, as soon as it was inaugurated on the 4th. The pandemic slowed down times and The construction of the prodigious artifact began a year ago. Girona affirms that this was viable thanks to the experience accumulated with the four previous projects. In a certain way, it can be said that all of MareNostrum is like a matryoshka in which each supercomputer contains, in terms of experience and know-how, its predecessors. “Making this installation from scratch would have been impossible,” says the engineer.
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