About the partner
Created in 2005, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) has the mission to research, develop, and manage information technology to facilitate scientific progress in computer science in an extensive range of applications (life sciences, Earth sciences, …). The BSC is a “Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence” institution and a hosting member of the European PRACE Research Infrastructure. It hosts MareNostrum IV and other High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources.
The BSC’s Earth Sciences Department (ES-BSC) researches Earth System modelling, focusing on air quality and mineral dust. It also researches developing and assessing dynamical and statistical methods for predicting global and regional climate on time scales ranging from a few weeks to several years.
Role in the project
The BSC leads the ESiWACE3 Consortium. Moreover, it is involved in 6 of the 7 WPs of the project.
In WP1, BSC will support increasing the efficiency of weather and climate simulations on state-of-the-art computers. WP2’s involvement mainly focuses on designing and developing community tools to close technology gaps for HPC. In WP3, the BSC will participate in the data challenge of high-resolution weather and climate modelling by developing novel data layout concepts and recommendations for domain-specific data compression derived from community input. WP4 will support the weather and climate modelling community via targeted services to enhance HPC applications.
The BSC also leads WP6, devoted to community engagement and disseminating and exploiting the results. WP7, also led by the BSC, is responsible for providing effective technical, administrative, and contractual management to achieve the project objectives, as well as for establishing and maintaining internal communication within the consortium and effectively interacting with the EuroHPC JU and EU.
List of people involved
Francisco Doblas-Reyes (PI), Mario Acosta (project and WP1 leader), Pierre-Antoine Bretonniere (WP3), Miguel Castrillo (WP1), Stella Valentina Paronuzzi (WP2), Mar Rodríguez (project manager and WP7 leader), Rosa Rodríguez (WP6 leader), Xavier Yepes (WP4).
Relevant infrastructure and services
The BSC hosts MareNostrum IV, the most powerful supercomputer in Spain. The general-purpose block has 48 racks with 3,456 nodes. Each node has two Intel Xeon Platinum chips, each with 24 processors, amounting to 165,888 processors and a main memory of 390 Terabytes. Its peak power is 11.15 Petaflops, i.e. it can perform more than eleven thousand trillion operations per second. Although its power is ten times greater than its predecessor's, it only increases energy consumption by 30% and is now 1.3 MWatt-year.
The BSC also hosts CTE-POWER, a cluster based on IBM Power9 processors, with a Linux Operating System and an InfiniBand interconnection network. 54 nodes, each of them with 2 x IBM Power9 8335-GTH and 4 x GPU NVIDIA V100 (Volta). It’s mainly used to process AI computational demanding workflows.
And the BSC also manages a Tier-2 Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) node.