The European Union could contribute around 100 million euros to install the MareNostrum 5 in the National Center for Supercomputing, in Barcelona.
The European Commission (EC) has announced that Spain will host one of the great European supercomputers of the EuroHPC initiative. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – National Center for Supercomputing (BSC – CNS) has been chosen as one of the three institutions that will host the pre-exascale supercomputers of the high capacity supercomputer network. The European Union could invest around 100 million euros in the new supercomputer, its highest investment in a research infrastructure in Spain.
The future computer of the BSC – CNS, MareNostrum 5, will have a peak power of 200 Petaflops (200 thousand billion operations per second) and will be launched on December 31, 2020. In addition to the rest of the employers of the National Supercomputing Center ( the Generalitat of Catalonia and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia), the installation of the European supercomputer in Spain has had the support of Portugal, Turkey, Croatia and Ireland, participating countries of EuroHPC that collaborate in the project.
The announcement of the Commission is one of the steps envisaged in the roadmap of the EC and the States that form the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking so that the European Union remains in a prominent place in the international career in the field of supercomputing.
The Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities in office, Pedro Duque, said that it is an "immense joy that the EC has opted for the Spanish bid to host one of its latest generation supercomputers at the National Supercomputing Center of Barcelona".
The minister highlighted the work carried out by the Government of Spain and the important collaboration of the rest of the countries that have supported the candidacy to get "to install in Barcelona a supercomputer, the MareNostrum 5, which will have a much higher power than the current one and will allow Spain to lead the future map of supercomputing in Europe. "
Duque explained that supercomputing "has been and is a strategic area for Spain" and that the National Supercomputing Center "is a world leader in science and innovation, with 600 highly qualified workers coming from more than forty countries and a department of Research in Computer Sciences of first international level ".
Finally, he highlighted "the work that the EC is developing in this technological area so that Europe can continue competing with the United States, China and Japan, which have advanced a lot in this field".
About the National Supercomputing Center
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – National Center of Supercomputing (BSC-CNS) is the leading center of supercomputing in Spain. His specialty is high performance computing, also known as HPC (High Performance Computing). Its function is twofold: to offer infrastructures and service in supercomputing to Spanish and European scientists, and to generate knowledge and technology to transfer them to society.
The BSC-CNS is a Severo Ochoa Center of Excellence, a leading member of the European research infrastructure PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) and manages the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES).
The BSC is a public consortium formed by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities of the Government of Spain (60%), the Department of Enterprise and Knowledge of the Generalitat of Catalonia (30%) and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (10%) .