Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) to develop next-generation supercomputers

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) will be part of a partnership with NEC Corporation, a Japanese multinational electronics and information technology corporation, and Openchip, a public-private engineering company based in the Catalan capital. Their goal is to develop a new vector computing accelerator for use in supercomputing data centres.

With this partnership, the BSC is taking another big step forward. Some months ago, the centre launched the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, which is the largest investment Europe has ever made in a scientific facility in Spain, with a total cost of €202 million. The new vector computing processor will benefit from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center’s design experience and NEC Corporation’s leadership in supercomputing architectures.

Additionally, it is important to note the Barcelona Supercomputing Center’s role in developing artificial intelligence. Currently, the top supercomputing research centres are the ones using artificial intelligence to tackle problems that would otherwise be impossible to resolve.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centre Nacional de Supercomputació is a public consortium of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Government of Catalonia and Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Founded in 2004, it now has more than a thousand employees and offers supercomputing facilities and services.