Atos Awarded MareNostrum 5 Supercomputer Contract by EuroHPC JU for Barcelona Supercomputing Center 

Atos SE has been chosen to provide the pre-exascale system to be hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, in Spain, as part of the EuroHPC JU (European HPC Joint Undertaking).

Marenostrum at Barcelona Supercomputing Center

MareNostrum 5 will rank amongst the world’s top HPCs and will pave the way toward exascale capabilities. 

This new system will support the EU’s mission to provide European scientists and industry with access to cutting-edge HPC infrastructures and services, with the main objective to strengthen medical research capabilities across Europe. Atos is already supporting Europe’s HPC capabilities by providing pre-exascale systems for 5 other EuroHPC projects out of 8.

With a power capacity up to 314 petaflops, or at least 314 million billion calculations per second, the system called MareNostrum 5 is tailored to boost European medical research through drug research, the development of vaccines, virus spread simulations as well as artificial intelligence and big data processing applications. The system will also unlock computing performance for HPC specific complex applications, such as climate research, engineering, material science and earth sciences, which require to be managed out of the cloud.

BullSequana XH3000
Click to enlarge

As the prime contractor, Atos will manage the delivery of the entire MareNostrum 5 HPC in close cooperation with European technology specialist ParTec AG, who will provide core parts of the solution and support Atos in the technical coordination of the project. A large accelerator partition will be based on Atos’ recently announced BullSequana XH3000 next-gen hybrid architecture – the largest installation WW – integrating GPU nodes using Nvidia Corp.’s H100 Tensor Core GPU, based on the new Hopper architecture and with 4^th gen Xeon Scalable processors (codenamed Sapphire Rapids). The company will also deliver nodes with Nvidia’s Grace CPU Superchip for the next-gen general purpose technology evaluation partition.

The Lenovo general purpose compute partition, provided through ParTec, will be based on ThinkSystem SD650 V3 Neptune nodes with 4^th gen Xeon Scalable processors – to build one of the largest general purpose scientific HPC WW. The storage part of the system, also provided through ParTec AG, will use IBM Spectrum Scale global data platform. Both the accelerator and general purpose compute partitions will benefit from advanced Direct Liquid Cooling solutions to provide an energy-efficient system. MareNostrum 5 will be interconnected with the Nvidia Quantum-2 400Gb/s InfiniBand networking platform.

“The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking continues to lead the way in European supercomputing. MareNostrum 5 will provide European scientists and industry with access to cutting-edge HP  infrastructures and services. It will power medical innovation but also climate research, engineering and earth sciences while supporting our objective to promote green and sustainable technologies,” said Anders Dam Jensen, executive director, EuroHPC Joint Undertaking

“The acquisition of MareNostrum 5 will enable world-changing scientific breakthroughs such as the creation of digital twins to help solve global challenges like climate change and the advancement of precision medicine. In addition, BSC-CNS is committed to developing European hardware to be used in future generations of supercomputers and helping to achieve technological sovereignty for the EU’s member states,” said Mateo Valero, director, BSC-CNS

“As Europe’s leading supercomputing manufacturer, we are proud to be supporting Europe’s commitment towards technological excellence and sovereignty with the MareNostrum 5 pre-exascale system. With this solution fully manufactured in Europe, we will support researcher to accelerate scientific discovery and to develop solutions for current and future challenges,” commented Emmanuel Le Roux, group SVP, global head of HPC, AI and Quantum, Atos. 

Atos’ BullSequana range is and will be used in 6 EuroHPC supercomputing centres; Sofia Tech Park in Bulgaria (Discoverer), CINECA in Italy (Leonardo),  IZUM in Slovenia (Vega), LuxProvide in Luxembourg (MeluXina), Minho Advanced Computing Centre in Portugal (Deucalion), and now in Barcelona Supercomputing Center.