The objective of these funds is for the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) to have the necessary resources for the construction of the new European supercomputer MareNostrum 5, which will require a global investment of 223 million euros.
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The European Union will contribute 50% of this budget and the rest will be distributed among the three patrons of the BSC-CNS, the Generalitat, the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, and the states that supported the Barcelona bid: Portugal, Turkey and Croatia.
In 2019, the EU granted the BSC-CNC to be the headquarters of one of the three pre-exascale supercomputers, the MareNostrum 5, which will have a maximum performance of 200 Pflops, a processing capacity equivalent to 200,000 trillion operations per second. This figure means that the new computer will multiply the power of the current MareNostrum 4 (13.7 Pflops) by 18.
The Government has approved today at the meeting of the Executive Council this transfer of 59 million euros until 2029 in compliance with the agreement signed with the UPC and the State, which must now also materialize their contributions. These 59 million will be charged to the annual budget of the Department of Business. This 2020 there will be a monetary injection of 13.5 million and for 2021 almost 8 million are planned.
"The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is a great scientific infrastructure and a leading research center in technology development," emphasizes the Government, which fully assumes in this first phase the cost of 12 million for the new electrical substation necessary to supply medium voltage energy to the future supercomputer.
The MareNostrum 5 will be installed in a building being constructed next to the Torre Girona chapel of the UPC, where the MareNostrum 4 is currently located. This equipment has become one of the main assets of the research carried out in Catalonia linked to the fight against the Covid-19 virus.