MareNostrum (, ) is the main

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It is the most powerful supercomputer in Spain, one of thirteen supercomputers in the Spanish Supercomputing Network and one of the seven supercomputers of the European infrastructure

PRACE Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed Euro ...

(Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe). MareNostrum runs

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial Linux distribution developed by Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version for x86-64. Fedora Linux and ...

. It occupies 180 m² (less than half a

basketball Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular Basketball court, court, compete with the primary objective of #Shooting, shooting a basketball (ball), basketball (appro ...

court). The supercomputer is used in human

genome A genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding genes, other functional regions of the genome such as ...

research Research is creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge. It involves the collection, organization, and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular attentiveness to ...

protein Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residue (biochemistry), residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including Enzyme catalysis, catalysing metab ...

research, astrophysical simulations,

weather forecasting Weather forecasting or weather prediction is the application of science and technology forecasting, to predict the conditions of the Earth's atmosphere, atmosphere for a given location and time. People have attempted to predict the weather info ...

, geological or geophysical modeling, and the design of new

drugs A drug is any chemical substance other than a nutrient or an essential dietary ingredient, which, when administered to a living organism, produces a biological effect. Consumption of drugs can be via inhalation, injection, smoking, ingestio ...

. It was booted up for the first time on 12 April 2005, and is available to the national and international scientific community. ''

Mare Nostrum In the Roman Empire, () was a term that referred to the Mediterranean Sea. Meaning "Our Sea" in Latin, it denoted the body of water in the context of borders and policy; Ancient Rome, Rome remains the only state in history to have controlled th ...

'' ("our sea") was the

Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: *Rome, the capital city of Italy *Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of Roman civilization *Epistle to the Romans, shortened to Romans, a letter w ...

name for the

Mediterranean Sea The Mediterranean Sea ( ) is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the east by the Levant in West Asia, on the north by Anatolia in West Asia and Southern Eur ...

. The supercomputer is housed in the

deconsecrated Deconsecration, also referred to as decommissioning or ''secularization'' (a term also used for the external confiscation of church property), is the removal of a religious sanction and blessing from something that had been previously consec ...

Chapel Torre Girona at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia,

Barcelona Barcelona ( ; ; ) is a city on the northeastern coast of Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second-most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within c ...

Spain Spain, or the Kingdom of Spain, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe with territories in North Africa. Featuring the Punta de Tarifa, southernmost point of continental Europe, it is the largest country in Southern Eur ...

MareNostrum 5

In July 2019, th
EuroHPC
Joint Undertaking selected the Barcelona Supercomputing Center as one of the entities that will host a pre- exascale supercomputer in the high-capacity supercomputer network promoted by the European Commission. It was expected that MareNostrum 5 became operational on December 31, 2020, but its deployment got delayed until December 2023. It will include an experimental platform dedicated to testing and developing European supercomputing technologies. Among other changes MareNostrum 5 is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.

MareNostrum 4

MareNostrum 4 has been dubbed the most diverse and likely the most interesting supercomputer in the world thanks to the heterogeneity of the architecture it will include once the installation of the supercomputer is complete. Its total speed will be 13.7 petaflops. It has five storage racks with the capacity to store 14 petabytes (14 million gigabytes) of data. A high-speed Omni-Path network connects all the components in the supercomputer to one another. The supercomputer includes two separate parts: a general-purpose block and a block featuring emerging technologies. The general-purpose block has 48 racks with 3,456

Lenovo Lenovo Group Limited, trading as Lenovo ( , zh, c=联想, p=Liánxiǎng), is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in designing, manufacturing, and marketing consumer electronics, personal computers, software, servers, conv ...

ThinkSystem SD530 compute nodes. Each node has two Intel Xeon Platinum chips, each with 24 processors, amounting to a total of 165,888 processors and main memory of 390 terabytes. Its peak performance is 11.15 petaflops. While its performance is 10 times greater than its predecessor, MareNostrum 3, its electricity consumption only increased by 30% to 1.3 MW. The block of emerging technologies is formed of clusters of three different technologies, which will be incorporated and updated as they become available on the market. These technologies are currently being developed in the United States and Japan to speed up the arrival of the new generation of pre-exascale supercomputers. They are as follows: * Cluster comprising IBM

POWER9 POWER9 is a family of superscalar, multithreading, multi-core microprocessors produced by IBM, based on the Power ISA. It was announced in August 2016. The POWER9-based processors are being manufactured using a 14 nm FinFET process, in ...

and NVIDIA Volta GPUs, with a computational capacity of over 1.5 petaflops. IBM and NVIDIA will use these processors for the Summit and Sierra supercomputers that the US Department of Energy has ordered for its Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. * Cluster made up of AMD Rome processors and

AMD Radeon Radeon () is a brand of computer products, including graphics processing units, random-access memory, RAM disk software, and solid-state drives, produced by Radeon Technologies Group, a division of AMD. The brand was launched in 2000 by ATI ...

Instinct MI50. The machine will have a processor and accelerator similar to the Frontier supercomputer that will be installed in 2021 at ORNL. The computing power of the machine will be 0.52 Petaflop/s. * Cluster formed of 64-bit

ARMv8 ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of RISC instruction set architectures (ISAs) for computer processors. Arm Holdings develops the ISAs and lice ...

processors in a prototype machine, using state-of-the-art technologies from the Japanese Post-K supercomputer. Computing power over 0.65 Petaflop/s. The aim of gradually incorporating these emerging technologies into MareNostrum 4 is to allow BSC to experiment with what are expected to be the most advanced technological developments over the next few years and evaluate their suitability for future iterations of MareNostrum. MareNostrum 4 has a disk storage capacity of 14 petabytes and is connected to BSC’s big data facilities, which have a total capacity of 24.6 petabytes. Like its predecessors, MareNostrum 4 will also be connected to European research centres and European universities via the RedIRIS and

GÉANT GÉANT (''Gigabit European Academic Network'') is the pan-European data network for the research and education community. It interconnects national research and education networks (NRENs) across Europe, enabling collaboration on projects rangin ...

networks.

MareNostrum 3

The previous version, MareNostrum 3, consisted of 3,056 IBM iDataPlex DX360M4 compute nodes, for a total of 48,896 physical Intel Sandy Bridge cores running at 2.6 GHz, and 84 Xeon Phi 5110P in 42 nodes. MareNostrum 3 had 36 racks dedicated to calculations. In total, each rack had 1,344 cores and 2,688 GB of memory. Each IBM iDataPlex Compute rack was composed of 84 IBM iDataPlex dx360 M4 compute nodes and four

Mellanox Mellanox Technologies Ltd. () was an Israeli-American multinational supplier of computer networking products based on InfiniBand and Ethernet technology. Mellanox offered adapters, switches, software, cables and silicon for markets including high ...

36-port Managed FDR10 IB Switches. dx360 M4 compute nodes were grouped into a 2U Chassis, having two columns of 42 2U chassis. The computing nodes of MareNostrum 3 communicated primarily through a high bandwidth, low latency

InfiniBand InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used ...

FDR10 network. The different nodes were interconnected via fibre optic cables and Mellanox 648-port FDR10 Infiniband Core Switches. In addition, there was a more traditional local area network consisting of

Gigabit Ethernet In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use in ...

adapters.

MareNostrum 2

These older version has been based on a 2,560

IBM BladeCenter The IBM BladeCenter was IBM's blade server architecture, until it was replaced by Flex System in 2012. The x86 division was later sold to Lenovo in 2014. History Introduced in 2002, based on engineering work started in 1999, the IBM eServer ...

JS21 nodes with PowerPC 970MP processors and with 20 TB system memory.

Research areas

The supercomputer MareNostrum 4 is used in various research areas, ranging from predicting climate change to

biomechanics Biomechanics is the study of the structure, function and motion of the mechanical aspects of biological systems, at any level from whole organisms to Organ (anatomy), organs, Cell (biology), cells and cell organelles, using the methods of mechani ...

and the analysis of

Big Data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

Atmospheric composition

Some projects in this area focus on researching air quality and developing air quality models as tools to identify sources and processes that determine air quality, as well as predict pollution episodes. Another project investigates aerosols and how they interact with the atmospheric system by dispersing and absorbing solar radiation. Among the many projects in this category, some explore

smart cities A smart city is an urban area that uses digital technology to collect data and operate services. Data is collected from citizens, devices, buildings, or cameras. Applications include traffic and transportation systems, power plants, utilities ...

and the optimization of transportation and human health.

Big data

This research line includes projects studying the interaction of individuals with computers and others aimed at creating visual and algorithmic tools for analyzing and studying large volumes of data.

Bioinformatics

One of the main projects in this area involves the integration, storage, and transmission of a large volume of clinical data and simulation data.

Biomechanics

Projects in this category involve simulations of the cardiovascular or respiratory systems.

Climate prediction

Projects in this area cover services for agriculture and water management, ocean forecasting, the study of tropical cyclones, and determining the most efficient locations for wind turbines.

Cloud computing

Current projects in this area focus on energy informatics and the optimization of data centers.

Education

Analysis of best practices related to education.

Engineering simulations

Projects include reducing pollutant emissions, drug design, and assisting in fluid mechanics computations, among others.

Geophysics

Activities involve earthquake simulation, detecting the presence of fluids at great depths beneath the Earth's surface, and analyzing the properties of our planet's surface.

Social simulations

Research in this area includes studying cultural evolution, energy efficiency, or public safety to develop smart and resilient cities, as well as the study of human groups.

Image gallery

File:MareNostrum 4 supercomputer at Barcelona Supercomputing Center 1 br.jpg, MareNostrum 4 supercomputer at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (2017) File:MareNostrum 4 supercomputer at Barcelona Supercomputing Center 2 br.jpg, MareNostrum 4 supercomputer at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (2017) File:MareNostrum4 topview.jpg, MareNostrum 4 - Top view of supercomputer at Barcelona Supercomputing Center File:BSC-MareNostrum-A.JPG, MareNostrum 2 - View from CPU's racks File:BSC-MareNostrum-B.JPG, MareNostrum 2 - Racks of CPUs File:BSC-MareNostrum-C.JPG, MareNostrum 2 - Refrigerated jail File:BSC-MareNostrum-D.JPG, MareNostrum 2 - Refrigerated racks File:BSC-MareNostrum-E.JPG, MareNostrum 2 - Door

References

External links

Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Top 500 supercomputers

IBM's MareNostrum page

Slashdot: Building The MareNostrum COTS Supercomputer

MoDEL Database

MareNostrum IV User's guide
{{DEFAULTSORT:Marenostrum IBM supercomputers Lenovo supercomputers Spanish Supercomputing Network IDataPlex supercomputers