The Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), one of the main scientific infrastructures in the Catalan capital, has just opened a new corporate headquarters, located just behind the Torre Girona chapel, where the supercomputer is housed. The building inaugurated this Thursday, the BSC-Repsol Building, will house the new machine, which will have more volume and capacity.
MareNostrum 5, which will replace the current MareNostrum 4, will occupy two underground floors of the new building. This space is expected to be ready to receive it by early 2022. The first parts of the future supercomputer will begin to arrive in June, after the European Commission selects which company will build it between March and April. However, it will not be until the end of next year when the new supercomputer is fully installed.
The BSC-Repsol Building, designed by the BAAS architecture firm, will be connected to the chapel via a walkway, allowing the two buildings to complement each other in case MareNostrum 5 requires more space than available in the new building, depending on the characteristics of the machine that wins the tender. Currently, the available space in Torre Girona is 150 square meters. With the new headquarters, the total surface area will increase to 1,000 square meters.
The construction of these new facilities has cost 19.6 million euros. It has been financed by the center's patrons, the Government, the Generalitat, and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), and has had the collaboration of the Repsol Foundation, which gives it its name, and Feder funds. The State contributes 60% of the BSC's funding, along with contributions from the Generalitat and the UPC.
At the inauguration of the building, the Secretary General for Research of the Ministry of Science and Innovation, Raquel Yotti, and the Minister of Research and Universities, Gemma Geis, agreed to celebrate the collaboration between both administrations to foster the success of the BSC.
For his part, the president of Repsol, Antonio Brufau, also highlighted the good relationship between his company and the BSC, which began in 2007 and, until now, has resulted in an investment of almost 20 million euros.
With meeting points for researchers
With an area of 12,000 square meters, the new building will accommodate more than 500 BSC workers, a figure that represents two-thirds of its staff ---it has a total of 765 workers---. The rest will be distributed between Torre Girona and another building, all of them close to each other, around the gardens surrounding the chapel. In this way, one of the pending issues of this scientific infrastructure will be solved, concentrating its employees in the same area, leaving behind the time when they were located in seven buildings and had to go from one side of the UPC campus to the other to meet.
BSC workers will be distributed between the BSC-Repsol Building, Torre Girona, and another building, all of them close to each otherPrecisely, in the BSC-Repsol Building, spaces have been created to foster contact among researchers, with the aim of promoting new discoveries.The building has four office floors, 35 meeting rooms, two training rooms and an auditorium, as well as a terrace and a cafeteria where the supercomputer workers will be able to see each other. "It will allow for greater interaction among the more than 600 researchers at the center, who until recently were spread across different buildings and will now have meeting points to exchange ideas and experiences and create new synergies, with all the positive implications this has for the creation of knowledge," values the director of the BSC, Mateo Valero.
Despite everything, the newly inaugurated headquarters has already become too small, without enough space to accommodate the entire staff. For the rector of the UPC, Daniel Crespo, this shows that the BSC is a project that still has a long way to go after 15 intense years that have made it grow more than expected. "Today is a milestone, but it is not a time to stop," Crespo summarized.
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