New European Supercomputer Inaugurated in Spain

MareNostrum 5, the latest European supercomputer, was inaugurated in Barcelona, Spain. Currently ranked as one of the 10 most powerful supercomputers in the world, it is hosted at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and will be accessible to a wide range of European scientific and industry users from March 2024.

MareNostrum 5 has a peak performance of 314 Petaflops or 314 million billion calculations per second. It is also the greenest supercomputer in Europe. It will be highly energy efficient, and fully powered with sustainable energy. The heat it generates will be used to heat the building where it is located.

It is one of the most innovative supercomputing systems in the world, specifically designed to solve complex scientific problems. It will help advance Europe's work in several areas. The supercomputer will enhance other European initiatives such as Destination Earth, which aims to develop a highly accurate digital model of the Earth on a global scale, and the European Virtual Human Twin, also launched by the Commission today. The Virtual Human Twin initiative will help scientists better understand the human organism and lead to improved healthcare and personalized medicine.

MareNostrum 5 is also designed to be used by AI)developers. It will use the most advanced accelerator chips available today, which will help it meet the needs of emerging AI platforms and boost the performance of European large AI language models. As announced by President von der Leyen in her State of the Union address, MareNostrum 5 will be available to European AI start-ups to train their models. This should help accelerate the deployment of European technologies and ethical AI-based algorithms allowing the EU to lead global efforts in responsible, ethical, and safe AI.

The new system represents a total investment of over €151 million to cover its acquisition and maintenance, with 50% coming from the EU and 50% from a Spanish-led consortium which also includes Portugal and Türkiye. The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) is a legal and funding entity created in 2018 to enable the EU and EuroHPC participating countries to coordinate their efforts and pool their resources to make Europe a world leader in supercomputing. In July 2021, the Council adopted the EuroHPC JU Regulation, bringing a further investment of €7 billion for the period 2021 – 2027. Soon, EuroHPC JU's capabilities will be extended to exascale performance and beyond with the JUPITER and JULES VERNE consortium exascale supercomputers.