The European Commission (EC) has announced that Spain will house one of the large EuroHPC supercomputers in Europe. The Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) has been chosen as one of the three institutions to house the pre-exascale supercomputers for the high-performance supercomputing network. The European Union could invest close on 100 million euros in the new supercomputer, its largest investment in any research infrastructure in Spain.
The future BSC computer - MareNostrum 5 - will have a peak power of 200 petaflops (200 quadrillion operations per second) and will start operating on 31 December 2020. Besides the other trustees of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (the Regional Government of Catalonia and the Technical University of Catalonia), installation of the European supercomputer in Spain was supported by Portugal, Turkey, Croatia and Ireland, the EuroHPC countries taking part in the project.
The announcement by the European Commission is one of the steps included in the roadmap drawn up by the EC and the Member States of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking to ensure that the European Union maintains an important position in the international supercomputing race.
The Acting Minister for Science, Innovation and Universities, Pedro Duque, said it is "enormously good news that the EC has chosen Spain's bid to house one of its next-generation supercomputers at the National Supercomputing Centre in Barcelona".
The Spanish minister highlighted the work carried out by the Government of Spain and the important collaboration from the other countries that supported the bid to ensure "the installation in Barcelona of a supercomputer - MareNostrum 5 - which will be far more powerful than the existing computer and will enable Spain to lead the future supercomputing map in Europe".
Pedro Duque explained that supercomputing "has been and still is a strategic area for Spain" and that the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre "is a global benchmark in science and innovation, with 600 highly qualified professionals from over 40 countries and a world-class department for research in computing science".
Finally, he underlined "the work being done at the European Commission in this technology so that Europe can continue to compete with the United States, China and Japan, which have made huge strides in this field".
About the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre
The Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) is the leading supercomputing centre in Spain. It specialises in high-performance computing (HPC). It has a dual purpose: to offer supercomputing infrastructures and services to Spanish and European scientists; and to generate knowledge and technology for transferral to society.
The BSC is a Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence, a first-class member of PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) and manages the Spanish Supercomputing Network (Spanish acronym: RES).
The BSC is a public consortium made up by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities of the Government of Spain (60%), the Department for Enterprise and Knowledge of the Regional Government of Catalonia (30%) and the Technical University of Catalonia (10%).
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