A new 151 million Euro ($160 million U.S.) pre-exascale supercomputer called MareNostrum 5 is coming to Barcelona under a procurement contract signed Thursday by EuroHPC and Bull SAS, a unit of Atos.
MN5 will offer peak performance of 314 petaflops, equal to 314 million billion calculations each second. It will also have 200 petabytes of storage and 400 petabytes of active archive.
The supercomputer is expected to strengthen Europe medical research through drug research, vaccine development, vaccine spread simulations and AI and big data app for climate research, material science and earth sciences, EuroHPC said in a release. Many expect it will be the fastest AI supercomputer in the EU.
MN5 will feature Nvidia’s new Grace CPU, Nvidia said via email to Fierce Electronics. Grace is also being deployed in Los Alamo National Laboratory’s Venado system in the U.S., and the Swiss National Computer Center’s Alps system.
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MN5 will be hosted at the new Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which is designed specifically for it with high energy efficiency including heat reuse technology. Part of the goal of MN5 is to help EU member states achieve technological sovereignty, said Mateo Valero, director of the center
Half of the investment will come from EuroHPC and therefore half of MN5’s computing resources will be allocated to EuroHPC users. Bull was selected as the vendor after bids were first requested in December 2021. EuroHPC JU has procured seven supercomputers with five fully operational in Finland, Slovenia, Luxembourg, Bulgaria and Czech Republic. Two others are underway in Italy and Portugal.