Up to date

Projects

One hundred million euros to have one of Europe's most powerful supercomputers in Barcelona

In 2012, Barcelona will have one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe thanks to the European Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) which on Wednesday was officially constituted in the Catalan capital, even though the headquarters of the association will be in Brussels.

14 june 2010

Photo: Prace

The President of the Generalitat, José Montilla, chaired the inaugural meeting of PRACE at the Palau de Pedralbes in Barcelona. Also present were the Deputy Director General of the European Commission Information Society Zoan Stancic, Italy’s Secretary of State for Education, Universities and Research Giuseppe Pizza and the Spain’s Secretary of State of Research Felipe Petriz, among other officials. Neelie Kroes, the Commission vice-president for the Digital Agenda said, “I warmly welcome the launch of this initiative because it is a key motor for the development of modern science and technology and addresses the main challenges of our time, such as the aging population, climate change and energy efficiency.”

The PRACE project will coordinate advances in supercomputing from different European countries to ensure the EU’s global leadership in this area. It counts on 20 members, five of which have the status of main partners: France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Spain. Participation in the project assumed by the governments of Spain and Catalonia will mean a financial investment of €100 million between now and 2014.

Rewarding the efforts of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center

The preliminary work on PRACE dates back to 2004, when representatives from eight European supercomputing centers began to coordinate contacts, and ended with the establishment of this association to support common efforts and to prevent fragmentation within the EU itself.

Participation as a main partner ensures having one of the top five supercomputer in the EU as well as the world. This is possible through a rotation system whereby each year one of the main partners will launch a new, high-performance machine that will be the latest in the EU and will be available to European science and industry. The work plan states that Germany has its supercomputer this year, France in 2011, Spain in 2012 and Italy in 2013.

The origins of the Catalan participation in this project are found in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BCS), led by Drs Francis Subirada and Mateo Valero, with a special focus on the MareNostrum supercomputer, which in 2004 was the first supercomputer in the EU. Currently, the BSC has about 200 employees and runs MareNostrum 80% of available hours, combining public research with research by private companies, including multinationals such as IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsysitems, Airbus and Repsol.

Some examples of biomedical research that PRACE will allow that directly affect the quality of life of the population include developing a 3D model of how the proteins fold, which would help to understand the interaction of cells with drugs, and studying the process of blood flow in the case of heart disease, which would improve medicine’s abilities to prevent strokes.

Joining this European project is therefore a key milestone in the strategic plans of the Spanish and Catalan governments to move towards a new production model based on innovation and research.

More information

Subjects of the article