MareNostrum5 supercomputer inaugurated in Barcelona

The MareNostrum5 supercomputer, in which Portugal participates through the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), was inaugurated on December 21 in Barcelona.

MareNostrum5 is one of Europe's most powerful supercomputers, belonging to the pre-exascale category. It is structured into four partitions, each with different characteristics, making it a particularly rich platform in terms of advanced computing, capable of solving a very wide range of problems. The accelerated computing partition, which is more geared towards artificial intelligence and numerical simulation, was ranked as the third most powerful in Europe and eighth in the world. The generic computing partition is the 19th most powerful in the world, making MareNostrum5 the only European supercomputer with two entries in the world's top 20. (https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/list/2023/11/). It also has a new-generation generic computing partition based on the Nvidia GRACE CPU processor, and a fourth partition for new-generation accelerated computing will be defined in the future.

This supercomputer was born out of Spain's bid to host and co-finance a pre-exaflop scale computer with the support of Portugal. Turkey also joined Spain's consortium bid. Portugal will have access to 5% of the capacity, with 45% shared between Spain and Turkey. The remaining 50% is earmarked for Calls managed by EuroHPC. These percentages are the same as those assumed by each partner in the acquisition of these systems.

Alongside the inauguration of Deucalion, held on September 6 this year in Guimarães, the actions planned under the European partnership of the Horizon Europe framework program, which brought Portugal and Spain together in the EuroHPC joint undertaking, aimed at promoting the development of supercomputing in Europe, are now being implemented. With access to these resources, FCT will provide the national community with a varied and powerful set of advanced computing resources over the next five years.

Along with the availability of these resources, FCT will now associate computing time on these machines (Deucalion and MareNostrum 5) under the Calls projects in all scientific fields, without requiring additional scientific evaluation. To do so, simply indicate your interest in these types of resources in your application, which is already effective in Calls 2023 Calls in all scientific fields, whose opening notices were published on December 22, 2023.