• BSC Builds 21st Century HPC In A 19th Century Cathedral

    October 23, 2017 Rob Johnson

    This summer, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) added to its roster another of the world’s most powerful high performance computing systems. The Barcelona Computing Center’s new MareNostrum 4, delivered by IBM with the help of partners Lenovo and Fujitsu, and fueled by HPC technologies from Intel, will facilitate extensive engineering and scientific research in fields like astrophysics, weather forecasting, and genome research. Nestled within a unique building – the Torre Girona chapel, which fell out of use – the fourth generation MareNostrum system relies on a general purpose cluster working with three specialized clusters to achieve its …

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  • BSC’s Mont Blanc 3 Puts ARM Inside Bull Sequana Supers

    January 22, 2017

    The HPC industry has been waiting a long time for the ARM ecosystem to mature enough to yield real-world clusters, with hundreds or thousands of nodes and running a full software stack, as a credible alternative to clusters based on X86 processors. But the wait is almost over, particularly if the Mont-Blanc 3 system that will be installed by the Barcelona Supercomputer Center is any indication.

    BSC has been shy about trying new architectures in its clusters, and the original Mare Nostrum super that was installed a decade ago and that ranked fifth on the Top 500 list when it …

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  • BSC Keeps Its HPC Options Open With MareNostrum 4

    December 1, 2016

    When it comes to supercomputing, you don’t only have to strike while the iron is hot, you have to spend while the money is available. And that fact is what often determines the technologies that HPC centers deploy as they expand the processing and storage capacity of their systems.

    A good case in point is the MareNostrum 4 hybrid cluster that the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, one of the flagship research and computing institutions in Europe, has just commissioned IBM to build with the help of partners Lenovo and Fujitsu. The system balances the pressing need for more general purpose computing …

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  • Lenovo Drives HPC From The Middle Ground

    November 30, 2016

    While we all spend a lot of time talking about the massive supercomputers that cultivate new architectures, and precisely for that reason, it is the more modest cluster that makes use of these technologies many years hence that actually cultivates a healthy and vibrant HPC market.

    Lenovo picked up a substantial HPC business when it acquired IBM’s System x server division two years ago and also licensed key software, such as the Platform Computing stack and the GPFS file system, to drive its own HPC agenda. The Sino-American system maker has been buoyed by higher volume manufacturing thanks to the …

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  • Mont-Blanc Sets The Stage For ARM HPC

    June 16, 2015

    The Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which has done a significant amount of research and development on alternative architectures for supercomputers over the years, has just fired up a prototype system based on the kinds of ARM chips that are typically found in smartphones and other client devices. The work to cluster these low-end hybrid CPU-GPU systems is providing the software foundation that could help ARM take on the hegemony of the X86 architecture in HPC and even possibly put hybrid ARM-GPU systems in contention with X86-GPU systems with much more oomph per chip.

    The thinking is that for certain massively …

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