This morning, in a high-level institutional event, the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, installed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center of the National Supercomputing Centre (BSC-CNS), was inaugurated. The performance of the MareNostrum 5 will enable international science to take a step forward. Such is its impact that the inauguration today brought together a long list of personalities, such as Pedro Sánchez, President of the Spanish Government, Pere Aragonès, President of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Mateo Valero, Director of the BSC-CNS, and Jaume Collboni, Mayor of Barcelona, among others.

The MareNostrum 5 can achieve up to 18 times the performance of its predecessor, the MareNostrum 4. The new supercomputer aims to reach 200 petaflops (200,000 trillion operations per second) and has a storage capacity of 248 petabytes, the only one of its kind in the world. Its performance will enable MareNostrum 5 to meet the needs of all scientific disciplines and will contribute to providing Europe with the most advanced technology in the field of supercomputing and accelerate the capacity for artificial intelligence research.

MareNostrum 5 has been built in collaboration with the European Union, Spain, Portugal and Turkey in the framework of the European supercomputing strategy EuroHPC, an institution that coordinates efforts and resources with the aim of deploying a network of supercomputers to ensure Europe’s technological and digital autonomy. The development of this supercomputer has had 35% public investment, from the Spanish Government (23.33%) and the Generalitat de Catalunya (11.66%); and 65% from European funds and from the States that supported this candidacy: Portugal, Turkey and Croatia.

Jaume Collboni welcomed those attending the opening ceremony of MareNostrum 5, organised by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. In his speech, the Mayor stressed that MareNostrum 5 “is the city of Barcelona’s most ambitious commitment to science and technology, a crucial infrastructure for the future of Catalonia, Spain and Europe”. A commitment that, moreover, is part of a strategy that includes projects such as the Ciutadella Knowledge Hub or the new Hospital Clínic. “It is one of the most powerful scientific infrastructures in the world. It will be key for research, which will allow us to advance in fields such as research in areas like Alzheimer’s, but also in sustainability and smarter cities,” he said.

In his speech, Pedro Sánchez stressed that “we share the aim of turning Barcelona into a European scientific benchmark, for the benefit of Barcelona, Catalonia and the whole of Spain”. The chief executive defined the facilities that house the MareNostrum 5 as “a centre of excellence in the new knowledge economy”. Sánchez also underlined the fundamental role that the Ministries of Science, Innovation and Universities and Digital Transformation, whose recent creation is a clear demonstration of the Government’s commitment to digitalisation, will play in the digital deployment. “This is the confirmation that our country is looking towards the challenge of digitalisation with full determination and without any fear of the transformations it implies,” he said.

About the Barcelona Supercomputing Center

BSC is one of the five major European centres specialising in High Performance Computing (HPC) and a leader in Europe in the development of open source computing technologies (freely available and distributed). It is a leading member of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) initiative, the pan-European High Performance Computing research infrastructure set up in 2010 by the European Commission with the aim of closing Europe’s supercomputing gap.

The BSC runs the MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe. So far, four versions have been built, located in the old chapel of the Torre Girona. The MareNostrum 5 version has been installed in the new BSC headquarters, which has allowed the team that until now worked in different buildings to be grouped together. The Torre Girona chapel continues to house supercomputing infrastructures.

It also manages the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES) and in addition to carrying out research work (it currently has 64 groups and 150 research projects) it also offers supercomputing services to the scientific community throughout the country, focusing on four fields: Computational Sciences, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences and Computational Applications in Science and Engineering. These projects are developed within the framework of EU research funding programmes, Spanish and Catalan public research calls and collaborations with leading companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia, Lenovo, Repsol and Iberdrola.

On 14 November, the LINPACK Top500 list was published at the world’s largest supercomputing conference in Denver (USA), which ranks the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, and the BSC is the only supercomputing centre in Europe with two entries in the top 20. At the same congress, the MareNostrum 5 was announced as the year’s most successful supercomputer of the year.