Imagine what 380,000 upper-mid-range laptops could do together. All this calculation capacity is available in a single machine that has just become the most powerful supercomputer in Spain.

An early Christmas gift arrives today at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – National Computing Center (BSC-CNS): this Thursday they inaugurate the MareNostrum5 supercomputer, the last of the supercomputers that this center houses since the first one, MareNostrum1, was installed in 2004.. In these two decades, technology and computing capacity have taken giant steps, as demonstrated by the mountain of technical data offered by those responsible for this research center during the presentation of this machine, one of the most powerful in the world.. Its cost amounts to 202 million euros, of which 151 have been spent on the machine and the rest on operation and maintenance costs over the next five years.

This supercomputer has a maximum total performance of 314 petaflops, which is equivalent to the ability to perform up to 314,000 trillion calculations per second.. In other words, it does in one hour what a mid-high-end laptop would take 46 years to do.

In addition to being more powerful and faster, it has greater storage capacity, going from the 15 Pbytes available in MareNostrum 4 to 650 Pbytes. This means, according to a comparison offered by the BSC, that MareNostrum 5 could house 1,280 copies of all the books cataloged throughout history.

The jump is big compared to the MareNostrum4 – it is 23 times more powerful than its predecessor – and gigantic if we compare it to the little brother of the family, since it is approximately 10,000 times more powerful than the MareNostrum 1.

“Frontier science today cannot advance without the use of large computational resources. Biology, astronomy, engineering, climatology… it is almost impossible to be on the frontier of these disciplines without them,” said Josep M. Martorell, associate director of the BSC, during a virtual press conference to present the computer.

The calculations made with the MareNostrum family computers are used for many and varied areas of research.. “We want machines that solve society's problems and this is a very advanced machine. We are very happy that the BSC is at the service of science. All the money we receive, which is a lot, is to create jobs,” said Mateo Valero, director of the BSC.. Of the approximately one thousand employees of this center, 800 are researchers.

“User needs are increasingly complex and diverse,” says Martorell.. By increasing computing power, system memory and the number of cores, MareNostrum 5 will make it possible to address more and more complex problems in artificial intelligence and large volumes of data analysis.. For example, they hope to generate massive language models by training much larger neural networks with hundreds of billions of parameters, using data sets infinitely larger than those currently available.

Likewise, those responsible mention climate change simulations, which may have higher resolution, going from representing phenomena with spatial scales of hundreds of kilometers to including processes that take place on scales of a few kilometers.. This will result in predictions being much more accurate and reliable.. Within this field, MareNostrum 5 will allow Spain to play a relevant role in the European Union's Destination Earth project, which develops a complete virtual replica of the Earth that allows predicting the effects of climate change.. In the field of energy, they will simulate generation processes of new forms of energy such as nuclear fusion.

Another notable application is the design of new drugs, vaccine development and simulations of how viruses spread.. In the materials and energy science chapter, they will focus on the design and optimization of aircraft to make them safer and more efficient.

The main beneficiaries of MareNostrum5 will be Spanish and European scientists, who can access their calculations through calls that prioritize the most outstanding projects, and depending on the investment made by the European Commission and the participating states.. “Much of the science that the BSC does is done by ourselves, but most of it is collaborating with others,” said Valero, a doctor of Telecommunications engineering.

With MareNostrum 5, they say, more projects can be attended to than with MareNostrum 4, and it will also be available for companies, although with special conditions.

According to Valero, MareNostrum 5 will consist of four parts, of which the two largest will be inaugurated this Thursday. “One of them has the most advanced chips currently available for artificial intelligence, it is the best prepared machine in Europe for it,” he noted.

Compared to other supercomputers, the MareNostrum 5 makes the BSC the only supercomputing center in Europe with two entries in the top 20 of the LINPACK ranking that classifies the 500 most powerful supercomputers on the planet. Two of its systems (a general-purpose partition, dedicated to classical computing, and an accelerated partition, designed to expand the frontiers of knowledge in artificial intelligence) are ranked 19th and 8th among the 20 most capable supercomputers worldwide. the world.

The installation and maintenance of such a complex machine is another chapter full of challenges, as detailed by the Director of Operations, Sergi Girona.. All the infrastructure necessary for it to function occupies about 2,000 square meters, almost triple what was needed for MareNostrum4.. As those responsible for the BSC have detailed, the deployment of MareNostrum5 alone occupies an area of about 800 square meters, comparable to three tennis courts.. The room is more than six meters high, with a 1.20 meter false floor to house electrical and cooling components and the fire prevention system.. “We spend 8% of the energy on cooling the machine,” said Girona.

Another curious fact: placed in a straight line, the copper and fiber optic cables of this computer could reach from Barcelona to Perpignan, as they have a total length of 160 kilometers.

BSC

Eviden has been the supplier chosen to make this supercomputer a reality, which incorporates technology from companies such as Lenovo, IBM, Intel and Nvidia, and in whose installation the German consulting firm Partec has also participated.

Valero regrets, however, that there is no European processor in MareNostrum5 (they are from Intel): “European technology must be developed,” stressed the director of the BSC.. “We are thinking about what the Marenostrum 6 will be like and the letter we ask the wise men is that the supercomputer that we will install within five or six years has European processors, designed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center with a spin off company with private and public capital “, advancement.

“If Europe as a whole does not make a strong commitment to this type of infrastructure, European scientists will not be able to compete with colleagues from other countries,” said Martorell.

Quantum computers

While they launch the MareNostrum5 with their mind set on the MareNostrum6, at the BSC they are also finalizing the launch of the two quantum computers that will arrive in the coming months at this computing center and that will be the first quantum computers in southern Europe. One of them is the first quantum computer of the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES), which is part of the Quantum Spain initiative. The second is one of the first European quantum computers, since the BSC was selected as one of the six centers that will host the first European quantum computing network. Both quantum computers will be among the first to come into operation in southern Europe.

“Thanks to the work of many people, we are going to have two quantum computers with European technology. We want the chapel [Torre Girona] of the BSC, which is an emblem and has become very famous, to be a sanctuary that houses the quantum processors and not European quantum, and that we are proud of everything that the people of the house have done,” said Valero.