The Barcelona Supercomputing Center ( es, Centro Nacional de Supercomputación) is a public research center located in

Barcelona Barcelona ( , , ) is a city on the coast of northeastern 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 ci ...

Catalonia Catalonia (; ca, Catalunya ; Aranese Occitan: ''Catalonha'' ; es, Cataluña ) is an autonomous community of Spain, designated as a ''nationality'' by its Statute of Autonomy. Most of the territory (except the Val d'Aran) lies on the north ...

Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , i ...

. It hosts

MareNostrum MareNostrum (, ) is the main supercomputer 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 ...

, a 13.7

Petaflops In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...

, Intel Xeon Platinum-based

supercomputer A supercomputer is a 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 instructions ...

, which also includes clusters of emerging technologies. , it ranked 13th in the world. , it dropped to 88th. It is expected to host one of Europe's first

quantum computers Quantum computing is a type of computation whose operations can harness the phenomena of quantum mechanics, such as superposition, interference, and entanglement. Devices that perform quantum computations are known as quantum computers. Though ...

Location and management

The Center is located in a former

chapel A chapel is a Christian place of prayer and worship that is usually relatively small. The term has several meanings. Firstly, smaller spaces inside a church that have their own altar are often called chapels; the Lady chapel is a common ty ...

named ''Torre Girona'', at the

Polytechnic University of Catalonia The Technical University of Catalonia ( ca, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, , es, link=no, Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña; UPC), currently referred to as BarcelonaTech, is the largest engineering university in Catalonia, Spai ...

(UPC), and was established on April 1, 2005. It is managed by a

consortium A consortium (plural: consortia) is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments (or any combination of these entities) with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for ...

composed of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (60%), the

Government of Catalonia The Executive Council of Catalonia ( ca, Consell Executiu) or the Executive Government of Catalonia (Catalan: ) is the Executive (government), executive branch of the Generalitat of Catalonia. It is responsible for the political action, regul ...

(30%) and the UPC (10%). Professor Mateo Valero is its main administrator. The

supercomputer is contained inside an enormous glass box in a former chapel.

Budget

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center had an initial operational

budget A budget is a calculation play, usually but not always financial, for a defined period, often one year or a month. A budget may include anticipated sales volumes and revenues, resource quantities including time, costs and expenses, environmenta ...

€ The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone and unilaterally adopted by Kosovo and Montenegro. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists ...

5.5 million/year (about

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

7 million/year) to cover the period of 2005–2011. The center has had a very rapid growth and in 2018 had a workforce of around 600 workers and an annual global budget of more than 34 million euros. The Center has contributed to the development of the IBM cell microprocessor architecture. 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)

Staff

*Director: Mateo Valero *Associate director: Josep Maria Martorell *Computer Sciences director: Jesús Labarta *Computer Sciences associate director: Eduard Ayguadé *Life Sciences director:

Alfonso Valencia Alfonso Valencia is a Spanish biologist, ICREA Professor, current director of the Life Sciences department at Barcelona Supercomputing Center. and of Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute (INB-ISCIII). From 2015-2018, he was President of the In ...

*Earth Sciences director: *Computer Applications for Science and Engineering director: José María Cela"José María Cela"
Barcelona Supercomputing Center. *Operations director: Sergi Girona

In popular culture

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center appears in

Dan Brown Daniel Gerhard Brown (born June 22, 1964) is an American author best known for his Thriller (genre), thriller novels, including the Robert Langdon novels ''Angels & Demons'' (2000), ''The Da Vinci Code'' (2003), ''The Lost Symbol'' (2009), ''In ...

's 2017 science fiction mystery thriller novel ''

Origin Origin(s) or The Origin may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Comics and manga * Origin (comics), ''Origin'' (comics), a Wolverine comic book mini-series published by Marvel Comics in 2002 * The Origin (Buffy comic), ''The Origin'' (Bu ...

'', as the home of the E-Wave device.

Notes

External links

Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)
{{authority control Research institutes in Catalonia Polytechnic University of Catalonia Supercomputer sites 2005 establishments in Catalonia Research institutes established in 2005