At the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) they are used to making excessive technological leaps. "The MareNostrum 5 is 30 times faster than the MareNostrum 4 and 10,000 times faster than the MareNostrum 1," says its director, Mateo Valero, via videoconference. It's hard to swallow. He tells it as if it were the most natural thing to do, which is to be expected. He inhabits a world that works with other figures. The MareNostrum are the supercomputers developed by this global research centre, from the first, in 2005, to the fifth, which opens on 21 December and will serve science in crucial challenges: from the projection of climate change to the development of digital twins – simulators – of the human body for medical purposes. going through other issues as dissimilar and valuable as, for example, the refinement of the linguistic capacity of artificial intelligence or the improvement of urban interventions. Valero remembers that, when they were starting out, a foreign colleague blurted out: "We can all have our hour of glory." Two decades later, the BSC has grown from counting its staff in a few dozen to nearly a thousand. And it has established itself as one of the top five supercomputing centres in Europe. "It looks like we've survived," says the manager.
Valero, a pioneer of computing in Spain, explains that the formidable pace of refinement of these megamachines is due to the fact that the speed of the processors – the basic functional units of computers – has been increasing from year to year and, at the same time, to the also increasing capacity to make massive quantities of them work together.
Arrival of the first two racks at the BSC, in December 2022.Vicens Giménez ( © Vicens Gimenez)
MareNostrum 5 has a maximum computing power of 314,000 trillion operations per second. It is among the largest and most powerful supercomputers in the world, according to Linpack's Top 500 ranking. However, it has not been designed to break technical records, but to be as functional as possible for research, as its chief engineer, Sergi Girona, emphasizes: "Our goal was not to have the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Our purpose is to help solve the most complex scientific problems. And if we value it in this way, in terms of service to the scientific community, we believe that ours is the best, the most complete and versatile in the world."
The machine combines two systems, "a partition dedicated to classical computing and an accelerated partition." The latter will be dedicated to projects that use artificial intelligence, with 4,480 state-of-the-art Nvidia Hopper processors. Each of these chips has more than twice the power of the entire MareNostrum 1, which in 2005, when it went live, was the fourth fastest there was.
Entry and installation of the last computer cabinet, in May of this year. Vicens Giménez ( © Vicens Gimenez)
MareNostrum 5 has been the largest European investment in a scientific infrastructure in Spain. Its total cost was €207 million, €151 million for the development of the machine and another €56 million related to its energy consumption and maintenance over the next five years. 50% is funded by the European Commission and the other 50% has been assumed, in different proportions, by the public consortium based on the BSC-National Supercomputing Centre, formed by the Government of Spain, the Generalitat and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, plus two other countries that are part of the project, Portugal and Turkey.
Just about to premiere the MareNostrum 5, it is already expected that in five years there will be a new model, the MareNostrum 6. Valero specifies that this is the time it takes for these machines to become "obsolete". On the screen, he shows a notebook that accompanies him and in which he makes notes for the next supercomputer. For this challenge, he warns, the key will not be so much technical power as, we could say, strategic independence. "The challenge is for Europe to design its chips, and we have set out to realize this dream, for the first time, with MareNostrum 6 technology."
Assembly of cabling in the last rack (computer cabinet) of the MareNostrum 5, carried out last May. Vicens Giménez ( © Vicens Gimenez)
Computer cabinets of the supercomputer, in an image from March. Vicens Giménez
The project at number 5, which occupies a room of about 900 square meters in which more than 180 computer cabinets (racks) are distributed, began in 2017 with the search for financing, as soon as the 4th was inaugurated. The pandemic slowed down the times, and construction of the prodigious artifact began a year ago. Girona says this was feasible thanks to the experience gained with the four previous projects. In a way, it can be said that all MareNostrum is like a matryoshka in which each supercomputer contains, in terms of experience and know-how, its predecessors. "Making this installation from scratch would have been impossible," says the engineer.
Installation of nodes in the cabinets, in October. Vicens Giménez ( © Vicens Gimenez)
The refrigeration room, photographed in November. Vicens Giménez ( © Vicens Gimenez)
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