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 in four partitions, each with different characteristics which make it a particularly rich platform in terms of advanced computing, capable of solving a very wide range of problems. The accelerated computing partition, more oriented towards artificial intelligence and numerical simulation, has been ranked as the third most powerful in Europe and the 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 next-generation generic computing partition, based on the Nvidia GRACE CPU processor, and a fourth, next-generation accelerated computing partition will be defined in the future.

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

Along with the inauguration of Deucalion, which took place 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, have been embodied. 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 making these resources available, the FCT is now associating calculation time on these machines (Deucalion and MareNostrum 5) under the Calls projects in all scientific fields, without requiring an additional scientific evaluation. To do so, all you have to do is signal your interest in this type of resource when you apply, with effect already for the Calls projects in all scientific domains 2023, whose call notices were published on December 22, 2023.