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Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Coordinates: 41°23′22″N 2°6′58″E / 41.38944°N 2.11611°E / 41.38944; 2.11611
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Location
Barcelona, Spain
Coordinates41°23′22″N 2°6′58″E / 41.38944°N 2.11611°E / 41.38944; 2.11611
Map
Interactive map of Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Websitehttps://www.bsc.es/

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Spanish: Centro Nacional de Supercomputación) is a public research center located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It hosts MareNostrum, a 13.7 Petaflops, Intel Xeon Platinum-based supercomputer, which also includes clusters of emerging technologies. In June 2017, it ranked 13th in the world.[1][2] As of November 2022, it dropped to 88th.[3] It is expected to host one of Europe's first quantum computers.[4]

Location and management

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The Center is located in a former chapel named Torre Girona, at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), and was established on April 1, 2005. It is managed by a consortium composed of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (60%), the Government of Catalonia (30%) and the UPC (10%). Professor Mateo Valero is its main administrator. The MareNostrum supercomputer is contained inside an enormous glass box in a former chapel.

Budget

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The Barcelona Supercomputing Center had an initial operational budget of €5.5 million/year (about US$7 million/year) to cover the period of 2005–2011. The center has had a very rapid growth and in 2018 had a workforce of around 600 workers and an annual global budget of more than 34 million euros.[5]

The Center has contributed to the development of the IBM cell microprocessor architecture.[6]

  • MareNostrum 4 supercomputer at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (2017)
    MareNostrum 4 supercomputer at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (2017)
  • MareNostrum 4 supercomputer at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (2017)
    MareNostrum 4 supercomputer at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (2017)

Staff

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  • Director: Mateo Valero[7]
  • Associate director: Josep Maria Martorell[citation needed]
  • Computer Sciences director: Jesús Labarta[8]
  • Computer Sciences associate director: Eduard Ayguadé[9]
  • Life Sciences director: Alfonso Valencia
  • Earth Sciences director:[10]
  • Computer Applications for Science and Engineering director: José María Cela[11]
  • Operations director: Sergi Girona[citation needed]

Artificial intelligence and language technologies

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The Barcelona Supercomputing Center has participated in the development of public artificial-intelligence infrastructure for Spanish and Spain's co-official languages. The ALIA initiative, launched under Spain's national artificial intelligence strategy, provides open language models and related resources for Spanish, Catalan, Valencian, Basque and Galician.[12]

The project uses the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, located and managed by BSC, for training and deploying generative AI models.[13] In 2025, the Aina project announced the Salamandra family of models, developed by BSC, including 2B, 7B and 40B parameter versions. According to the project, Salamandra was trained from scratch using MareNostrum 5 and includes training data covering 35 European languages.[14]

A 2025 agreement published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado identified BSC-CNS as the beneficiary and coordinator of the ALIA project, whose work programme includes the development of high-quality corpora, foundation language models, evaluation datasets and secure training infrastructure for language technologies.[15]

BSC's Language Technologies Unit has published research on multilingual and translation-oriented language models, including the Salamandra and SalamandraTA model families.

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The Barcelona Supercomputing Center appears in Dan Brown's 2017 science fiction mystery thriller novel Origin, as the home of the E-Wave device.

Notes

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  1. ^ "MareNostrum 4 begins operation". BSC-CNS. Retrieved 2022-11-27.
  2. ^ "Top500 List - Supercomputer Sites". www.top500.org.
  3. ^ "TOP500 List - November 2022 | TOP500". www.top500.org. Retrieved 2022-11-27.
  4. ^ Granger, Gemma Garrido (2021-10-30). "Barcelona will be southern Europe's first quantum computing hub". Ara in English. Retrieved 2022-10-10.
  5. ^ "BSC-CNS in Numbers". www.bsc.es.
  6. ^ "Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC)". Bsc.es. Archived from the original on 2007-03-08. Retrieved 2011-09-03.
  7. ^ "1. Summary". BSC-CNS. Retrieved 2022-11-27.
  8. ^ "Jesús Labarta". Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
  9. ^ "Eduard Ayguade home page (Technical University of Catalonia - Barcelona)". personals.ac.upc.edu. Retrieved 2022-11-27.
  10. ^ "ICREA". www.icrea.cat. Retrieved 2022-11-27.
  11. ^ "José María Cela". Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
  12. ^ "ALIA: The public AI infrastructure in Spanish and co-official languages". Government of Spain. Retrieved 12 May 2026.
  13. ^ "ALIA: The public AI infrastructure in Spanish and co-official languages". Government of Spain. Retrieved 12 May 2026.
  14. ^ "Introducing the Salamandra family of models". Aina Tech Project. 29 May 2025. Retrieved 12 May 2026.
  15. ^ "Resolución de 3 de junio de 2025, del Consorcio Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación". Boletín Oficial del Estado (in Spanish). 14 June 2025. Retrieved 12 May 2026.
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