The BSC takes another giant leap with the launch of its fifth supercomputer

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) has once again taken a giant leap this Thursday with the commissioning of its fifth supercomputer, with greater computing capacity and memory. "Today is a great day for science," celebrated its director, Mateo Valero, accompanied at the inauguration by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, the President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, and the Mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni. The new scientific infrastructure has a power 10,000 times greater than its first version, installed in the chapel of the Torre Girona in 2004, and will allow progress in solving scientific problems and tackling some that until now could not even be considered. "It allows researchers to dream, to do things they never would have been able to imagine," Valero remarked.

The fifth supercomputer installed in the Catalan capital has involved an investment of more than 200 million euros over five years. It is financed by a consortium formed by the European Commission, which has assumed 50% of the budget, and the governments of Spain, with 35%, Turkey, with almost 10%, and Portugal, with 5%. Each contributor will have operating hours of the machine to develop their research according to their contribution. The selection of projects, in general, is done by competitive access, which implies that one out of three is carried out. The participation of other countries is explained because, separately, they do not have the capacity to have an infrastructure of these characteristics, but, by being part of a consortium, they can have access to the entire machine for a certain period of time. The number of projects that the system will be able to undertake increases compared to MareNostrum 4.

The MareNostrum 5 has also premiered a new location to be able to fit widely, occupying two floors of the BSC headquarters inaugurated more than two years ago, in an area of 800 square meters. In the completely white room where the supercomputer resides, with rows of towers and cables, silence reigns. The continuous flashes of green lights emitted by the machine indicate that it is running. These are the only visual proofs that reflect the problems it must be solving, although it does so at a speed that no person is capable of even imagining. Basically, because the new infrastructure has the capacity to perform up to 314,000 trillion calculations per second, which is equivalent to more than 380,000 laptops. As if that weren't enough, to do the calculations that MareNostrum 5 completes in one hour, a laptop would take 46 years. And, beyond its computing power, if one thinks about the memory it has, the fifth supercomputer of the BSC can store almost 1,300 copies of all the books cataloged throughout history ---a total of 170 million---.

The MareNostrum 5 occupies two floors of the BSC headquarters inaugurated more than two years ago, in an area of 800 square meters

The figures are overwhelming and it is even difficult to visualize them. In these cases, leaving aside the many zeros, it is better to think about what all those constantly blinking towers are working on. "We are here to help solve the problems that society has," Valero said. Some of them are the creation of a digital twin of the human body, with the aim of improving medicine, or of the Earth, to better study the impact of climate change and foresee its possible effects. It also has to serve to simulate wind farms, calculating exactly where to place the poles to get the most out of the wind that blows; design completely efficient airplanes at the time of takeoff; study new materials and forms of energy such as nuclear fusion; devise smarter cities; protect languages such as Castilian, Catalan, Basque and Galician, and, of course, to advance in the field of the now omnipresent artificial intelligence. For those who remain skeptical, years ago, the supercomputer allowed the development of a machine that predicted the possibility of finding oil, later, it was used by Repsol, which reported hundreds of millions in profits and hence contributed to the financing of the new headquarters, called BSC-Repsol Building.

Although MareNostrum 5 has left the chapel of the Torre Girona, the same one that fascinated Dan Brown, its previous home is very close and can be seen from the viewpoint that has been enabled to visit the supercomputer, which 20,000 people visit every year, including primary school students. "We are the only supercomputing center that has a visitable infrastructure. It is part of our mission. We want to generate vocation and for everyone to understand what our taxes are used for," defends the associate director of the BSC, Pep Martorell. In addition, the chapel will not be orphaned and will continue to have tenants. According to Valero, they plan to install processors of any type, both quantum and non-quantum, but, yes, of local origin: "We are not going to abandon it. It is an emblem that has made us very famous and we are going to turn it into a sanctuary of European technology."

It is not an isolated will and the BSC hopes that the next supercomputer, which they are already working on, will be integrated for the first time by European technology. "There is a new illusion of having an open and collaborative world in hardware and software. Although today we inaugurate MareNostrum 5, we have been thinking for two years about what MareNostrum 6 will be like. The letter we ask the Three Wise Men for is that the processors be European, designed in Barcelona with a spin-off of the BSC, OpenChip," Valero advanced. This startup will work to design a low-cost chip, with high processing power and low energy consumption, but the most important thing will be that it will generate open source products.

A diverse infrastructure to meet the needs of researchers

The supercomputer that has just been inaugurated is made up of two different machines, which allows solving many types of problems. "Users' needs are increasingly complex and diverse, and this is not going to stop. We have the best machines in the world because their complexity approaches what researchers ask for," Martorell emphasized. The technology company Eviden was the selected provider to supply the new supercomputer, which incorporates technology from other companies such as Lenovo, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia. The German consultancy Partec also participated in the installation.

The new BSC supercomputer is made up of two different machines, which allows solving different types of problems

The first MareNostrum 5 machine is a general-purpose system, dedicated to classical computing, with the capacity to execute multiple tasks simultaneously. Delivered by Lenovo, it will be the largest of its kind in the world. The second machine is an accelerated system, designed to advance artificial intelligence models. Manufactured by Eviden, it is made up of thousands of latest-generation Nvidia processors, and each of them has more than double the power of the entire MareNostrum 1, which occupied the entire chapel. With the mix of these two systems, the BSC becomes the only European supercomputing center to achieve two entries among the top 20 of the Linpack Top500, the ranking that classifies the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

These will not be the only two machines that will form MareNostrum 5, and the arrival of two more is expected. They will be characterized by being smaller and including technologies that are still incipient but are expected to become the technologies of the future. "The objective is to have all possible technologies to prepare science for when they are dominant. Adopting a technology that is not clearly installed allows researchers to develop the necessary programs for when it is," said the Director of Operations of the BSC, Sergi Girona Turell. Its launch is scheduled for the end of 2024.