MASTEAM students visit the Barcelona Supercomputing Center

As an activity of the Big Data and Data Mining course of the MASTEAM, past Tuesday March 29th the students and the lecturer of the course went to visit the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

The visit lasted for 1 hour during which the group was authorized to walk around and above the glass box that contains the MareNostrum, to see one of its more than 24,000 processing boards, and to visit the museum of the historical supercomputers of the center.

The MareNostrum is the most powerful supercomputer in Spain. It has 48,896 cores of commercial-of-the-self technology processors (Xean E5 Processors at 2.6GHz) and provides a computation power of 1.1 petaflops. The current configuration (MareNostrum 3) was set in 2012 and reached the 36th position of the Top500 supercomputing ranking list, being currently at the 93th world position.

Examples of public and private research projects that get fundings to use the MareNostrum high performance computing capacities are genome studies applied to medical studies and drugs designs, aircraft structure resistance projects, hydrocarbons prospectives and many other projects related to big data and parallel processing. It is worth mentioning the current involvement of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, together with other 30 research centers, in the application of big data technologies in the study of the climate change. Each simulation of the climate change covers one decade and generates between 135 terabytes and 5 petabytes of data.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center has recently celebrated its 10 years and holds a number of awards. It is located at the Torre Gironachapel, close to the UPC rectorate, in Barcelona Campus Nord.