ACADEMIA

MARENOSTRUM IS RANKED AGAIN AS THE MOST POWERFUL COMPUTER IN EUROPE: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A DISTRIBUTED SUPERCOMPUTING STRUCTURE IN SPAIN AND MARENOSTRUM WILL BE ABLE TO ATTEND THE INCREASING SUPERCOMPUTING REQUESTS OF THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY: The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) has increased the calculation capacity of the supercomputer MareNostrum, until reaching 94.21 Teraflops (94.21 trillions of operations per second), doubling its previous capacity (42.35 Teraflops). Additionally, the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science has created the Spanish Supercomputing network that consists in a distributed structure of supercomputers in order to provide support to the supercomputing needs of the different Spanish research groups. The Scientific research progress in several areas is being possible thanks to a close interaction between a Scientific-theoric base, the experiments and the computer simulation. Having enough calculation capacity is the key for the scientific and technological development of a country. The initial nodes of this network are located at the BSC-CNS, in the CesViMa (Centro de Supercomputación y Visualización de Madrid), in the IAC (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias) as well as in the Spanish Universities of Cantabria, Málaga and Zaragoza. MareNostrum had 4.812 processors and has now 10.240 processors with a final calculation capacity of 94.21 Teraflops. The CesViMa counts with 2.408 processors and a calculation capacity of 21.2 Teraflops. The rest of the institutions members of the Network have 512 processors and a calculation capacity of 4.5 Teraflops. MareNostrum is ranked again as the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, as in the November 2004 TOP500 list. Furthermore, it is in the fifth position in the world according to the list published today in Tampa, Florida (www.top500.org). The supercomputer of the CeSViMa is positioned among the ten first computers in Europe and in number 34 in the world ranking. The rest of machines of the Spanish Supercomputing Network are listed in positions 412, 413, 415, 416 y 417. With MareNostrum’s double capacity and the existance of the Spanish Supercomputing Network will be possible to attend the increasing supercomputing requests of the Spanish scientific community. Two years after its very start installation, the main reason for the update and the creation of the Spanish Supercomputing Network has been due to run more research projects. Nowadays the request of calculation hours of MareNostrum exceeds three times its capacity. The access to the Spanish Supercomputing Network by a scientific research group will be determined by an Access Commitee formed by independent Spanish well-known scientists. The technical management of this Network will be coordinated by the BSC-CNS together with each institution. MareNostrum has provided support to 200 research projects in areas such as Earth Sciences, Biomedicine, Chemistry, Materials Sciences, Physics, Engineering, Earth Sciences and Astronomy Space. For example, MareNostrum has helped to study the interactions between protein-protein and protein-ligand in order to improve the design of new drugs, it has helped to understand how the physical properties of DNA modulates the biological functions of molecules, to find similarities among different genomes (such as the human and rat genomes), to predict the air quality of the Iberian Peninsula, to model the emission and transport of natural dust from the Saharan desert until the European continent, to study the impact and consequence of the climate change in Europe, to simulate the universe formation, to improve the design of the hull and appendix of the Spanish ship that will compete in the America’s Cup 2007, to study the turbulences in an airplane wing inside the turbines, to investigate in the hadrons properties, to design nanofibres structurally stabled, to study the plasma physics confined magnetically or to optimize and scale monitoring, analysis and visualization tools in order to understand the behaviour of the parallel applications in supercomputers such as MareNostrum. Technical specifications of the actual MareNostrum - Peak Performance of 94.21 TeraFlops - 10240 IBM PowerPC 970 MP processors 2.3 GHz (2560 JS21 blades) - 20 TB of main memory - 280 + 90 TB of disk storage - Interconnection networks: Myrinet and Gigabit Ethernet - Linux: SuSe Distribution