The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is a public research center located in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain).
It hosts MareNostrum, a 13.7 Petaflops, Intel Xeon Platinum-based supercomputer, which also includes clusters of emerging technologies. In June 2017, it ranked 13th in the world. As of November 2022, it dropped to 88th. It is expected to host one of Europe’s first quantum computers.
As a service center, it has different supercomputers and high-capacity data repositories. In December 2023, the supercomputer MareNostrum 5 was inaugurated, with a performance 18 times higher than MareNostrum 4, its goal is to reach 200 petaflops (200,000 trillion operations per second), it also has a storage capacity of 248 petabytes, unique worldwide. It also has MinoTauro, the second most powerful supercomputer and which has been recognized for having an energy-efficient architecture. It also has Big Data infrastructures, which have a total storage capacity of 11 Petabytes.
Throughout 2007, several nodes of the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES) came into operation, which were created from the update of the MareNostrum supercomputer, increasing the computing resources offered by RES.
The Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES) is a distributed infrastructure involving the interconnexion of 12 supercomputers which work together to offer High Performance Computing resources to the scientific community. It is coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). Currently the RES is composed of 12 supercomputers located in different research centres and universities.
In September 2011, a cluster based on Nvidia GPUs, manufactured by Bull, was added to the Center. In November of the same year, the BSC reached an agreement with Intel whereby they will jointly establish an R&D laboratory on scalability and programming problems that may arise in ExaFLOP-sized supercomputers (1000 PetaFLOPS or 1,000,000 TeraFLOPS ). This laboratory would be the fourth in Europe with reference to Exascale research, others having been built in France, Germany and Belgium. In these centers Intel has developed architectures suitable for supercomputing such as the IntelMIC.
It has also reached an agreement with Nvidia to build a supercomputer based on ARM architecture with Nvidia Tesla accelerators, under the project called Mont-Blanc. At the same time, Nvidia named the BSC as a CUDA Center of Excellence, which means that the BSC will use its technology for future projects, as well as receive funding from it, and offer more training opportunities in massively parallel programming.
In June 2022, the contract for the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer was awarded, which will be inaugurated at the end of 2023. This contract involved an investment of more than 151 million euros to acquire and maintain the system.
Address: Plaça d’Eusebi Güell, 1-3, Les Corts, 08034 Barcelona, Spain.
Working hours:
Wednesday 8 AM–7 PM
Thursday 8 AM–7 PM
Friday 8 AM–7 PM
Saturday Closed
Sunday Closed
Monday 8 AM–7 PM
Tuesday 8 AM–7 PM
See also TOP universities of Spain
