Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Short description: Research and supercomputing facility

Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Location|

Barcelona, Spain

Coordinates|  [ ⚑ ] : 41°23′22″N 2°6′58″E﻿ / ﻿41.38944°N 2.11611°E﻿ / 41.38944; 2.11611
Website| https://www.bsc.es/

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Spanish: Centro Nacional de Supercomputación) is a public research center located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It hosts MareNostrum, a 13.7 Petaflops, Intel Xeon Platinum-based supercomputer, which also includes clusters of emerging technologies. In June 2017[update], it ranked 13th in the world.[1][2] As of November 2022[update], it dropped to 88th.[3] It is expected to host one of Europe's first quantum computers.[4]

## Contents

* 1 Location and management
* 2 Budget
* 3 Staff
* 4 Artificial intelligence and language technologies
* 5 In popular culture
* 6 Notes
* 7 External links

## Location and management

The Center is located in a former chapel named Torre Girona, at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), and was established on April 1, 2005. It is managed by a consortium composed of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (60%), the Government of Catalonia (30%) and the UPC (10%). Professor Mateo Valero is its main administrator. The MareNostrum supercomputer is contained inside an enormous glass box in a former chapel.

## Budget

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center had an initial operational budget of €5.5 million/year (about US$7 million/year) to cover the period of 2005–2011. The center has had a very rapid growth and in 2018 had a workforce of around 600 workers and an annual global budget of more than 34 million euros.[5]

The Center has contributed to the development of the IBM cell microprocessor architecture.[6]

* MareNostrum 4 supercomputer at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (2017)

* MareNostrum 4 supercomputer at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (2017)

## Staff

* Director: Mateo Valero[7]
* Computer Sciences director: Jesús Labarta[8]
* Computer Sciences associate director: Eduard Ayguadé[9]
* Life Sciences director: Alfonso Valencia
* Earth Sciences director:[10]
* Computer Applications for Science and Engineering director: José María Cela[11]

## Artificial intelligence and language technologies

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center has participated in the development of public artificial-intelligence infrastructure for Spanish and Spain's co-official languages. The ALIA initiative, launched under Spain's national artificial intelligence strategy, provides open language models and related resources for Spanish, Catalan, Valencian, Basque and Galician.[12]

The project uses the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, located and managed by BSC, for training and deploying generative AI models.[13] In 2025, the Aina project announced the Salamandra family of models, developed by BSC, including 2B, 7B and 40B parameter versions. According to the project, Salamandra was trained from scratch using MareNostrum 5 and includes training data covering 35 European languages.[14]

A 2025 agreement published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado identified BSC-CNS as the beneficiary and coordinator of the ALIA project, whose work programme includes the development of high-quality corpora, foundation language models, evaluation datasets and secure training infrastructure for language technologies.[15]

BSC's Language Technologies Unit has published research on multilingual and translation-oriented language models, including the Salamandra and SalamandraTA model families.

## In popular culture

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center appears in Dan Brown's 2017 science fiction mystery thriller novel Origin, as the home of the E-Wave device.

## Notes

1. ↑ "MareNostrum 4 begins operation" (in en). https://www.bsc.es/news/bsc-news/marenostrum-4-begins-operation.
2. ↑ "Top500 List - Supercomputer Sites". https://www.top500.org/list/2017/06/.
3. ↑ "TOP500 List - November 2022 | TOP500". https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/list/2022/11/.
4. ↑ Granger, Gemma Garrido (2021-10-30). "Barcelona will be southern Europe's first quantum computing hub" (in en). https://en.ara.cat/society/barcelona-will-be-southern-europe-s-first-quantum-computing-hub_1_4166573.html.
5. ↑ "BSC-CNS in Numbers". https://www.bsc.es/discover-bsc/the-centre/bsc-cns-in-numbers.
6. ↑ "Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC)". Bsc.es. Archived from the original on 2007-03-08. https://web.archive.org/web/20070308121821/http://www.bsc.es/projects/deepcomputing/linuxoncell/. Retrieved 2011-09-03.
7. ↑ "1. Summary" (in en). https://www.bsc.es/mateo-valero.
8. ↑ "Jesús Labarta". Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
9. ↑ "Eduard Ayguade home page (Technical University of Catalonia - Barcelona)". https://personals.ac.upc.edu/eduard/.
10. ↑ "ICREA". https://www.icrea.cat/Web/ScientificStaff/francisco-javier-doblas-reyes-499.
11. ↑ "José María Cela". Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
12. ↑ "ALIA: The public AI infrastructure in Spanish and co-official languages". Government of Spain. https://alia.gob.es/eng.
13. ↑ "ALIA: The public AI infrastructure in Spanish and co-official languages". Government of Spain. https://alia.gob.es/eng.
14. ↑ "Introducing the Salamandra family of models". Aina Tech Project. 29 May 2025. https://projecteaina.cat/tech/en/introducing-the-salamandra-family-of-models/.
15. ↑ "Resolución de 3 de junio de 2025, del Consorcio Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación" (in es). 14 June 2025. https://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2025-12053.

## External links

* Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)

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