Page 49 - EE Times Europe Magazine – June 2024

EE|Times EUROPE 49

SUPERCOMPUTERS
BSC’s Girona on MareNostrum’s Evolution and

Delivering World-Class Compute from Barcelona

By Pat Brans

oused in the basement of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) get into the top 100 by November 2004. The
headquarters, next to the Torre Girona chapel, where its four predeces- Torre Girona chapel had been desacralized in
1985 and was in the vicinity. So that’s where
sors were located, MareNostrum 5 is the only European supercomputer we built the data center, and we did it in four
Hto have earned two entries in the top 20 of the most powerful super- months. (By the way, the name of the chapel
computers in the world. Its accelerated partition appears in the most recent has no relation to my last name. That is
merely a coincidence.)
Top500 list as the world’s eighth-biggest supercomputer, and the second-biggest We named our cluster MareNostrum, which
in Europe. And its general-purpose partition is listed as the nineteenth-biggest is the Latin name for the Mediterranean Sea.
IBM loves the blue theme and Barcelona is
supercomputer in the world.
on the Mediterranean, which is blue. So that
EE Times Europe spoke to Sergi Girona, BSC director of operations and respon- name joins the two cultures.
sible for MareNostrum 5 operations, to find out more about how it started, the MareNostrum 1 was completed in 2004 and
achieved the fourth ranking in the Top500
types of applications it runs and future updates. list in November 2004. And as predicted,
Blue Gene/L displaced Earth Simulator as the
EE TIMES EUROPE: How did the For the other track, they wanted to build world’s top supercomputer in November 2004.
MareNostrum series begin? and run a commodity cluster, and they We are now on MareNostrum 5, which
Sergi Girona: In 2004, Mateo Valero, the wanted that to be outside the U.S. They was inaugurated in 2023 and is 23× more
current director of BSC, established a coop- had already been collaborating with Mateo powerful than its predecessor, MareNostrum
erative agreement with IBM to run a joint and his research group since 2000—and so 4—and nearly 10,000× more powerful than
research center. IBM had established two they chose to put the commodity cluster in MareNostrum 1. The new MareNostrum 5
tracks to build two different supercomputers Barcelona. That agreement was formalized also has more storage capacity—650 PB [peta-
that would both be counted among the on March 10, 2004. bytes], a big increase from the 15 PB that were
top 100 in the world. One was Blue Gene/L, The objective was to install the system in available in MareNostrum 4.
which was installed in the U.S. and built to the vicinity of the Polytechnical University With an interconnection network based on
do better than Earth Simulator, the Japanese of Catalonia campus, because that’s where InfiniBand NDR200, MareNostrum 5 allows
supercomputer that had maintained the Mateo’s group was—and they wanted to do it more than 8,000 nodes to exchange informa-
No. 1 spot since 2002. within four months to allow enough time to tion very efficiently to solve more complex

Barcelona Supercomputing Center’s Sergi Girona (Source: BSC-CNS)

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