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Barcelona Supercomputing Center celebrates its 10th anniversary

By 8 de April de 2015November 18th, 2020No Comments
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Més de 500 persones van assistir a l'acte de commemoració del 10è aniversari del Barcelona Supercomputing Center. © BSC-CNS.
 08.04.2015

Barcelona Supercomputing Center celebrates its 10th anniversary

Last Wednesday, more than 500 people from the political, scientific and industry fields attended the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS). Montserrat Vendrell, CEO of PCB and Ivo Gut, director of CNAG  attended the event in representation of the Parc Científic de Barcelona (PCB), where the BSC-CNS has installed the MinoTauro, one of its most advanced supercomputers – housed at the National Center for Genome Analysis (CNAG).

 

The opening ceremony was conducted by María Luisa Poncela, secretary general of Science, Technology and Innovation and Antoni Castellà, secretary general of Universities and Research, president and vice president, respectively of the Governing Council of the BSC-CNS.

The first panel featured the participation of the center´s current director, Mateo Valero, and  former director, Francesc Subirada, accompanied by Salvador Barberà, who was secretary general of Science and Technology Policy in 2005; Josep Bargalló, at the time first minister of the Generalitat de Catalunya, and Adalio Sánchez, then general manager at Solutions & Systems & Technology IBM´s Group. The second panel was formed by members of the Scientific Advisory Board of the BSC; Catherine Rivière, Horst D. Simon, Paul Messina, Satoshi Matsuoka, Thomas Zacharia and Manuel Peitsch. The third panel included  Carmen Vela, Secretary of State for Research, Development and Innovation; Andreu Mas-Colell, minister of Economy and Knowledge of the Generalitat de Catalunya; and Enric Fossas, rector of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.

Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence and CUDA

Founded in 2005, the BSC-CNS was created from a consortium formed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, through the General Secretariat of Science and Technology Policy; by the Catalan Government, through the Department of Innovation, Universities and Enterprise; and by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, through BarcelonaTech (UPC). In 2011, the “Severo Ochoa Center” received the recognition of Center of Excellence by the Ministry of Science and Innovation under the section on Physical and Engineering Sciences, and was one of eight Spanish research centers to obtain this recognition, which consolidates this institution as one of the best centers in the world in their research area.

BSC is a top ranking member of the European research infrastructure PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) and manages the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES). In 2010, this center was appointed by NVIDIA as the first CUDA Research Center in Spain, and a year later, it received the BSC-CNS CUDA Excellence Center award in recognition of its advances in GPU architecture programming. CUDA Research Centers are recognized institutions that use GPU-accelerators (GPU Computing) for different research fields.

Some of its top infrastructures are MareNostrum– at the service of the national and international scientific and technical community and public and private organizations- aimed at promoting international collaboration and connecting through communications networks other centers and institutions in their field. MareNostrum has a computing capacity of 94.21 teraflops (94.21 trillion operations per second) and has 10,240 processors. At present, it is one of the most powerful computers on the continent and one of the most powerful ones in the world as reported in the TOP500 Supercomputing Sites.

The center addresses multiple projects with various public organizations and companies to develop advanced technology and to foster public-private partnerships. One of these initiatives includes BSC´s agreement with Repsol that culminated in the creation of Repsol-BSC Research Center, a joint research center to develop advanced technology applicable to hydrocarbon exploration and other areas of interest.

MinoTauro, the supercomputer housed at CNAG 

Since 2011, the potential of the BSC-CNS has been strengthened with the addition of the  MinoTauro,  housed at the CNAG -located at Parc Científic de Barcelona- which doubles the computing capacity of MareNostrum, consumes seven times less power and occupies thirteen times less space. It is a new cluster with graphic accelerators aimed at facilitating research in programming models, development tools and application portability. In 2011, MinoTauro has been considered the most energy-efficient supercomputer in Europe according to the Green500 raking, which analyzes the relationship between computing power of a supercomputer and its energy-efficient consumption.