Immersion in the MareNostrum
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center offers virtual tours inside Spain's most powerful computer.
Manuel Girona was a 19th century banker and businessman from Barcelona who was also a politician and became mayor of the city. In 1860 he built his wealthy family's summer residence, the Torre Girona, in what is now the Pedralbes district. In the 1940s, a chapel was added to the complex, where today you won't find an altar or kneelers or confessionals, but rather the processors, circuits and other elements that make up the most powerful supercomputer in the country and one of the top 500 in the world: the MareNostrum. This device is part of the facilities of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) and you can discover it from home through virtual tours in two versions: one aimed at children, and the other for all audiences.
The MareNostrum is one of the facilities in which the BSC-CNS offers a service to high-performance computing research. The supercomputer is of great value for materials physics, biomedicine, astrophysics, climatology, engineering and many other disciplines in the scientific, technological and industrial sectors. Its use is enabling research excellence in data-intensive work and complex modelling, simulation and computation.
To respond to the new needs of science, construction began in 2004 on one of Europe's fastest computers, the MareNostrum 1, with a capacity to perform 42.35 trillion operations per second. The supercomputer has been updated in new versions and today the chapel of Girona’s Tower houses the 4th version of the MareNostrum, commissioned in mid-2017 and with almost 1000 times more power than its first ancestor. The latest version of MareNostrum is helping to expand knowledge about climate change, the AIDS vaccine, fusion energy and the study of gravitational waves, among many other lines of research.
Enter the chapel of the Girona Tower and discover why the MareNostrum is one of the most powerful computers in the world and how it plays a key role in the advancement of science and knowledge. You can enjoy the visit through this link.