There is already a new supercomputer on the map that will compete with the most powerful machines in the world, and it is in Barcelona. The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, inaugurated this Thursday together with the President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, the Marenostrum 5, the last of the copies of the new series of supercomputers, developed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS). The machine, which occupies a 1,000 square meter glass room in the new building built two years ago next to the old Torre Girona, in the Barcelona neighborhood of Pedralbes, has cost 200 million euros over five years and is financed by the Commission European by 50%, Spain by 35.13%, Portugal by 5% and Turkey by 9.87%.
Sánchez and Aragonès, together with the director of the BSC, Mateo Valero, and other political and academic institution officials, turned on the supercomputer together in an event broadcast live to the auditorium. The machine, which has a cooling system that occupies another 2,000 square meters, then began to make its characteristic noise. In parliaments, Sánchez has connected this inauguration with the one that 175 years ago saw the first railway line between Barcelona and Mataró deployed on the peninsula. “Barcelona is once again the port of entry for the scientific revolution, but at that time, although it was of great magnitude, it arrived late: England already had 7,500 kilometers of roads. Now, in the fourth industrial revolution, we are in a position to lead the technological revolution,” said Sánchez. The President of the Government has highlighted that Marenostrum 5 is an example “of collaboration, and of the will for the industrialization and digital transformation of Europe.” “Europe can and must achieve autonomy in chip manufacturing,” said Sánchez, who also winked at Pere Aragonès due to the political situation that the country is going through: “Scientists are looking for solutions to problems that do not seem to exist.” they have, and this, president, we have to apply it too. Previously, Aragonès had highlighted the link of the supercomputer with the scientific network in Catalonia, and the BSC's vocation to serve citizens: “It represents a step forward in the provision of first-class infrastructure that will allow progress in research and European autonomy.
Valero, acclaimed in the audience for being one of the main promoters of this project, highlighted that the key word is “collaboration”. “The BSC is the result of many years of intense collaboration between the Government of Spain, the Generalitat and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. We have gone from 60 workers to 1,000, and although we only have 30% women and we have to improve in this indicator, we can say that we generate, retain and attract talent,” said Valero, who has described the Marenostrum 5 as a machine ” ideal”: “With the most powerful accelerators in the world and enormous storage capacity, we will be able to advance projects such as generating a human digital twin,” he explained, one of the projects that will allow aspects of health and biology to be monitored.
The scientific community has placed many expectations on this supercomputer, and has packed the auditorium where the presentation was made. No wonder: this machine is 10,000 times more powerful than the Marenostrum 1, inaugurated almost 20 years ago, and 23 times more powerful than the Marenostrum 4. The fifth version of the supercomputer has a maximum total performance of 314 petaflops, or what It is the same, a capacity to perform up to 314,000 billion calculations per second. The Marenostrum 5 joins the Lumi (Finland) and Leonardo (Italy) supercomputers as the most disruptive machines in Europe. Its power will provide Europe with the most advanced technology and will allow scientific advances in many areas, from artificial intelligence to the most exhaustive simulations of climate change.
The supercomputer has technology from Eviden, the supplier selected after the tender, and also incorporates technology from Lenovo, IBM, Intel and Nvidia, and the German consulting firm Partec has participated in its installation. It has two different systems: one part is dedicated to general purpose, classical computing, and the other is an accelerated partition, in which more ambitious calculations can be executed to expand the frontiers of knowledge. The two systems are among the 20 most capable supercomputers in the world, ranking 19th and 8th respectively.
European projects
The BSC supercomputer has the no less peculiarity of being publicly owned, which allows it to compete face to face with private initiatives while maintaining independence in the selection of projects. Its use is so requested that two out of every three projects that want to use the machine to do their calculations are left out, because there are no assigned hours left. The hours of use of the supercomputer are distributed among the projects of the countries that have invested in the machinery, and according to their percentage of participation. And they are assigned through competitive calls and with peer evaluation.
Valero, however, recalled that success is not without challenges: “The bad news is that Europe does not design high-performance chips. Supercomputers do not have chips designed in Europe, it is something that must be changed and it is time,” said the director of the BSC, who thanked the Government and the Generalitat for “the ambition to allocate so many resources”, conveyed in recent times through the Perte on the microchip, thanks to European funds.
The Marenostrum 5 has a capacity that leaves its great-great-grandfather far behind, the Marenostrum 1, located 20 years ago in the Torre Girona chapel, and which at the time was the fourth fastest in the world. Each chip of the Marenostrum 5, with a dimension of eight square centimeters, has more power than the entire Marenostrum 1. The new supercomputer also has a large storage capacity, with 650 Pbytes (the Marenostrum 4 had a capacity of 15 Pbytes). And another dizzying comparison: the calculations that the Marenostrum 5 makes in one hour, it would take a mid-range laptop 46 years.
One of the projects for which the Marenostrum 5 will be key is the Destination Earth project of the European Union, which aims to create a complete virtual replica of planet Earth to predict the effects of climate change. It will also make it possible to address complex artificial intelligence problems, generating massive language models by training neural networks much larger than those currently available. Or it will also be key in medical research projects, with the development of new drugs, vaccines or simulations of the spread of viruses. Finally, in the coming months the Marenostrum 5 will be integrated with two quantum computers, which will be installed in the chapel of the Torre Girona, where the four previous versions of the Marenostrum have been housed until now. The first quantum computer of the Spanish Supercomputing Network will be installed there, and one of the first European quantum computers developed by the European quantum computing network. Thus, the Marenostrum 5 will end up being made up of 4 interconnected computers of the latest generation. And the future? Valero explained that they have been thinking about the Marenostrum 6 for two years: “I hope it will be the first supercomputer that has all the European technology.”
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