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 c ...

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 no ...

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") , ...

. 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, 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 instructio ...

, 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 type ...

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, Spa ...

(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 ...

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 branch of the Generalitat of Catalonia. It is responsible for the political action, regulation, and administratio ...

(30%) and the UPC (10%). Professor

Mateo Valero Mateo Valero Cortés (born 1952 in Alfamén) is a Spanish computer architect. His research encompasses different concepts within the field of computer architecture, a discipline in which he has published more than 700 papers in journals, confer ...

is its main

administrator Administrator or admin may refer to: Job roles Computing and internet * Database administrator, a person who is responsible for the environmental aspects of a database * Forum administrator, one who oversees discussions on an Internet forum * N ...

. 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, environme ...

€ 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 o ...

5.5 million/year (about US$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 ...

*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'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