The purchase of the new supercomputer has been awarded to IBM, which will integrate its own technologies, as well as those of Lenovo, Intel, and Fujitsu, into a single machine. The contract was awarded through a public tender in which two other companies participated, for a total of almost €30 million.
In choosing the new MareNostrum, the BSC-CNS has sought a dual objective: to acquire a general-purpose machine suitable for carrying out all kinds of scientific and engineering work, and to equip the Barcelona Supercomputing Center with clusters built with emerging technologies, which will serve users and, in turn, allow the center to operate and analyze the performance of the most cutting-edge developments in the field of supercomputing.
Video mockup of MareNostrum 4: https://youtu.be/psB0_yZX7nM
Greater Energy Efficiency.
Thus, the new machine will have two distinct parts. The general-purpose block, provided by Lenovo, will have 48 racks with more than 3,400 nodes equipped with next-generation Intel Xeon chips and 390 terabytes of core memory. Its peak performance will be more than 11 petaflops/s, or in other words, it will be capable of performing more than 11 quadrillion operations per second, ten times more than MareNostrum 3, which was installed between 2012 and 2013. Although its performance will be ten times greater than its predecessor, its energy consumption will only increase by 30%, reaching 1.3 MW/year.
Emerging Technologies
. The emerging technologies block will consist of clusters of three different technologies that will be incorporated and updated as they become available. These are technologies currently being developed in the United States and Japan to accelerate the arrival of the next generation of pre-exascale supercomputers.
One of these clusters will consist of IBM POWER9 processors and NVIDIA GPUs, the same ones IBM and NVIDIA will use for the Summit and Sierra supercomputers that the U.S. Department of Energy has ordered for the Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. Their computing power will exceed 1.5 petaflops.
The second technology will consist of Intel Knights Landing (KNL) and Intel Knights Hill (KNH) processors supplied by Fujitsu and Lenovo, respectively. These are the same processors that will power the Theta and Aurora supercomputers that the same U.S. Department of Energy has ordered for Argonne National Laboratory. Their computing power will exceed 0.5 petaflops.
Finally, a third cluster will consist of 64-bit ARMv8 processors provided by Fujitsu in a prototype machine, utilizing the cutting-edge technology of the Japanese Post K supercomputer. It will also have a computing power exceeding 0.5 Petaflops.
progressive incorporation
of these emerging technologies into MareNostrum 4 aims to enable the BSC-CNS to operate with what are expected to be some of the most advanced developments of the coming years and to test their suitability for future versions of MareNostrum.
MareNostrum 4 will have a disk storage capacity exceeding 10 Petabytes and will be connected to the BSC-CNS's Big Data infrastructure, which has a total capacity of 24.6 Petabytes. Like its predecessors, MareNostrum 4 will also be connected to the network of European research centers and universities via the RedIRIS and GEANT networks.
ICTS, a member of PRACE and the Spanish Supercomputing Network,
began the process of upgrading the MareNostrum supercomputer following the decisions made by the Council of Ministers on December 4 and 18, 2015. These decisions authorized the necessary budget modifications for the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness to contribute €34 million plus VAT to the BSC-CNS for the acquisition of MareNostrum 4. Thirty million euros of this budget were allocated to the purchase of the computing clusters and the necessary upgrades to the electrical and cooling systems for their proper operation. The remaining four million euros were assigned to the parallel disk system of MareNostrum 4.
Like its predecessor, MareNostrum 3, the new supercomputer will be part of the European distributed supercomputing network, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), whose objective is to create a European high-performance supercomputing infrastructure.
The acquisition of MareNostrum 4 makes it possible to begin a new phase of the European supercomputing project PRACE, in which Spain will be able to maintain its status as a main partner alongside Germany, France, Italy, and Switzerland, the latter having recently joined.
MareNostrum 4 will also be part of the Spanish Network of Unique Technological Infrastructures (ICTS) and the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES). The new supercomputer will increase the computing power of the RES and will replace MareNostrum 3—installed in 2012—whose components will be distributed among different nodes of the Spanish network.
A brief history of MareNostrum:
MareNostrum is a facility that serves the scientific community and society. Supercomputers are now one of the fundamental pillars of science and engineering. Without them, numerous research projects requiring high computing and data processing capacity could not be carried out. They are used to create models and simulations and to handle large amounts of information from studies related to all areas of science.
