MareNostrum 5 (Barcelona Supercomputing Center)

The story

For two decades the Barcelona Supercomputing Center captivated the computing world by housing its MareNostrum supercomputers inside the deconsecrated 19th-century Torre Girona chapel, encased in a glass cube beneath vaulted ceilings and religious mosaics. In late 2023 BSC launched MareNostrum 5: while the chapel remains an exhibition center, the new 314-petaflop machine spans a purpose-built facility next door. Built by Bull/Eviden and Lenovo with NVIDIA and Intel chips, the machine uses warm-water cooling to heat the university campus while training medical and climate AI models.

Notable

• Heir to the celebrated MareNostrum lineage, which famously housed supercomputers inside a 19th-century church chapel.
• Delivers 314 petaflops peak performance divided between an accelerated GPU partition and a general-purpose CPU partition.
• Occupies a new purpose-built headquarters building immediately adjacent to the historic Torre Girona chapel.
• 100% warm-water liquid-cooled, with waste heat piped to heat the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya campus.

Expansions

• 2004: MareNostrum 1 installed inside Torre Girona 19th-century church chapel
• 2023: MareNostrum 5 inaugurated in adjacent custom facility reaching 314 petaflops peak
• 2024: quantum computing and European open RISC-V processors integrated into cluster