A Supercomputer in a Chapel, and a Synchrotron, Show Catalonia's High-Tech Aspirations

While I was in Barcelona for Mobile Globe Congress last month, I had the chance to visit the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It houses the MareNostrum 3, the largest supercomputer in Southern Europe. It'southward an interesting facility, housed in a one-time chapel, creating an interesting juxtaposition between former and new. (Having graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Constitute, the concept of a computing eye inside a former chapel brought back some memories.)

MareNostrum 3 consists of 36 racks of IBM iDataPlex Computer racks, each with 84 calculator nodes with dual Intel Xeon E5-2670 Sandy Bridge-EP viii-core processors, plus a management rack for a total of 3,056 computer nodes. Information technology uses an Infiniband network to tie it all together. In total, it has 48,896 cores, 96.62 TB of retentiveness, and a peak performance of ane.1 petaflops (quadrillions of floating-point operations per second), all for ane.08 megawatts of power. To put that in perspective, it is currently the 93rd fastest computer organization in the earth, according to the latest Top500 list.

Among the applications the supercomputer has been used for include poly peptide modeling to try to develop certain kinds of personalized medicine, fluid modeling, wind farms, and star mapping.

This tertiary generation became operational in 2022, but it's a testament to how fast computing is moving that it is scheduled to terminate operation this summertime, to be replaced by the side by side version, details of which have nevertheless to exist announced. Parts of older generations of supercomputers—including an IBM RS6000 and a Compaq Alpha—are tucked into corners of the chapel as a reminder of how applied science has progressed.

In some other area of the center, there are two racks of a dissimilar system, role of the MontBlanc project designed to test the application of ARM servers; the center is involved in porting applications and libraries to the server, which runs a version of Red Lid Linux. The goal is to find a more efficient estimator image.

As function of the tour, organized past the Catalonia Merchandise & Investment agency, I also visited ALBA, a third-generation synchrotron financed by the Catalan and Spanish governments. It's located 20 kilometers outside of the urban center. In a synchrotron, electrons are produced in a linear accelerator and further accelerated in a circle, then placed into a storage ring in a cavity inside a special bunker. The electron beam interacts with magnetic forces which deadening information technology, and create specific wavelengths of calorie-free, from infrared to x-rays. These intense beams of light are diverted into various experimental rooms, where the light is used for experiments in materials sciences, physics, chemistry, and structural biology. Applications include examining the construction of proteins for biomedical applications, and creating things like a crystallization of chocolate used for water ice cream.

ALBA, which started operations in May 2022, is a 30,000 foursquare meter facility with 7 beamlines with a total electron energy of 3,000 million electron Volts (three GeV). It is one of fewer than xx synchrotrons worldwide.

This is a model section of the synchrotron; when the blue area is used to focus the beam, the xanthous is used to keep the beam centered, and the cerise deviates the axle so that x-rays are captured for the various experiments.

The actual synchrotron has 32 such sections, encased in the bunker, which is really backside the model.

The Barcelona Synchrotron Park, an industrial park aimed at attract corporate research, is being built around ALBA.

The tour too stopped at Eurecat, a technology research center that does industrial research in areas such as 3D sound, industrial automation, industrial robotics, and materials.

The signal of the tour was to showcase how Catalonia is becoming a loftier-tech center, with a variety of unlike technologies, and that this extends well across the annual Mobile World Congress.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/opinion/11198/a-supercomputer-in-a-chapel-and-a-synchrotron-show-catalonias-high-tech-aspirations

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