MareNostrum 4, the Spanish supercomputer, is ready to work

If you are a computer lover, surely on some occasion you have seen the list of the best in the world, clearly dominated at the moment by China and the United States although, not far from the best on the planet we find a Spanish supercomputer that today, thanks to its new evolution, can reach surpass even NASA in supercomputing capacity.

As sure you know we talk about Mare Nostrum 4, a computer beast that today has been located in an old chapel, specifically in the Girona tower within the so-called Barcelona Supercomputing Center or perhaps much better known nationally, at least I have always heard it this way, as the National Supercomputing Center.

Going into a little more detail, we are talking about a supercomputer with a peak power of 11,1 Petaflops, that is, it is capable of performing no less than 11.100 billion operations per second, a power that will grow to 13,7 Petaflops Once its general purpose cluster, which currently has 48 racks with a total of 3.456 nodes, will be expanded with three new, smaller, state-of-the-art clusters in the coming months. All this power today is dedicated exclusively to research.

As a detail, tell you that all the clusters of this impressive machine have no less than two Intel Xeon Platinum chips that, in turn, have a whopping 24 processors each. If we do a quick count we find that MareNostrum 4 has a total of 165.888 processors and a central memory of 390 Terabytes.

Going a little deeper into the news that will soon come to MareNostrum 4, we find that the two new clusters that will soon be installed on this machine will be different in a certain sense, on the one hand one of them will be developed in the United States and will include processors so novelty like the IBM POWER9 and NVIDIA Volta GPUs, enough to offer a computing power greater than 1,5 Petaflops while the two remaining clusters are being developed in Japan and will, in turn, have processors ARMv8 and Intel Knights Hill, enough to offer 0,5 Petaflops each.

MareNostrum 4, the 'most diverse and interesting in the world'

Thanks to all these improvements, MareNostrum 4 will offer a computing power no less than 10 times higher than its predecessor while, as for energy, this just will increase 30%. Undoubtedly a more than interesting update, both in increasing its capabilities and in the mixture of different technologies, something that, in turn, has served to be called the supercomputer 'most diverse and interesting in the world'.

If we look at the list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, updated on June 19, we find that MareNostrum 4 ranks 13th as the world's fastest computer even ahead of real milestones such as Pleiades, the supercomputer that today resides at NASA's Ames Research Center. At European level, MareNostrum 4 occupies the Third place since, after this update, at the power level it is only surpassed by the Swiss Piz Daint and the computer that they have installed in the United Kingdom Meteorological Office.

How useful is MareNostrum 4?

Today MareNostrum 4 is available to all scientists in EuropeSpecifically, it can be used to process large calculations and especially complex simulations or, in some cases, for the analysis of large volumes of data. A clear example of what it is currently used for is in the applications that will be installed when it is operational again where we find many related to different fields such as climate change, the AIDS vaccine, the study of gravitational waves, development of new radiotherapies against cancer and even simulations on the production of fusion energy.