Last 23rd December, our group had the opportunity to attend the presentation of the new supercomputer that will be installed at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The event counted with the participation of the companies that collaborate in the start-up of the new machine: IBM, Intel, Lenovo and Fujitsu.
Like its predecessor MareNostrum 3, the new supercomputer will be part of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), a network which has the objective of creating a European high performance computing infrastructure.
Sergi Girona, operations director at BSC, outlined a few details of MareNostrum 4. The new supercomputer will have a performance capacity of 13.7 Petaflops and will consist of two distinct parts:
- a general-purpose machine provided by Lenovo with more than 3,400 nodes based on next generation Intel Xeon processors and a central memory of 390 Terabytes. This part will be capable of executing all types of scientific and engineering tasks and its peak power will be over 11 Petaflops.
- three clusters built with different emerging technologies to allow analysing the performance of the most recent developments in the field of supercomputing to achieve exascale supercomputers.
The description of these three clusters is as follows:
- A cluster made up of IBM POWER9 processors and NVIDIA GPUs with a computing power over 1.5 Petaflops.
- A second cluster made up of Intel Knights Landing (KNL) and Intel Knights Hill (KNH) processors provided by Fujitsu and Lenovo respectively. Its computing power will be in excess of 0.5 Petaflops.
- And a third cluster formed of 64 bit ARMv8 processors that Fujitsu will provide in a prototype machine, using state-of-the-art technologies from the Japanese Post-K supercomputer. This cluster’s computing power will also be over 0.5 Petaflops.
The representatives from the companies also made interventions to express thanks for this opportunity to collaborate with BSC. A few quotations are noted below:
“Working with BSC is vital for us and MareNostrum 4 is a tool for BSC to build excellence, science and innovation “, Fernando Egido (Head of Technology at FUJITSU)
“The responsibility of the BSC and our companies with the current technological transformation of society is tremendous”, Ángel Ruiz (Data Center Group Manager, Spain and Portugal, at Lenovo)
“The BSC is a worldwide benchmark in research and supercomputing, and has become a reference center especially regarding exascale tools.”, Norberto Mateos (Southern Europe Territory Director at Intel)
“We have been collaborating with BSC for more than 10 years and to survive another 10 years the research will have to be significant”, Javier Peman (Public Sector Sales Manager at IBM)
MareNostrum 4 will be a facility at the service of the scientific community and of society. Supercomputers are one of the fundamental pillars of science and engineering. Without them, it would be impossible to carry out a significant amount of research and a substantial number of the projects which require a large capacity for calculation and data handling as the simulation of fusion reactors.
More information: BSC news