MareNostrum

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MareNostrum Supercomputer

MareNostrum is the third most powerful supercomputer in Europe, (the most powerful supercomputer in Spain), according to the LINPACK benchmark used by TOP500. It was presented by IBM and María Jesús San Segundo, the Spanish Minister of Education and Science. This is one of the seven supercomputers of the Spanish Supercomputing Network.

The supercomputer consists of 2,560 JS21 blade computing nodes[2], each with 2 dual-core IBM 64-bit PowerPC 970MP processors running at 2.3 GHz for 10,240 CPUs in total.

The computing nodes of MareNostrum communicate primarily through a high bandwidth, low latency Myrinet network consisting of integrated Myrinet adapters on each server blade and switched fabric of 12 Myrinet switches. In addition, there is a more traditional local area network consisting of Gigabit Ethernet adapters and five Gigabit Ethernet switches (one Force10 E600 and four Cisco 3550s). The MareNostrum supercomputer has 20 TB of RAM and 280 TB of external disk storage for more persistent storage.^[1]

MareNostrum features BladeCenter JS21 blade servers running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. It is capable of 62.63 teraflops and a peak performance of 94.21 teraflops according to the LINPACK benchmark. It occupies only 120 m² (less than half a basketball court) and weighs 40,000 kg. The original installation was largely constructed in two months in San Fernando de Henares, Madrid (Madrid) and was installed in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Barcelona. It has since been upgraded with additional processors to reach the current total.^[2]

The supercomputer is used in human genome research, protein research, astrophysical simulations, weather forecasting, geological or geophysical modeling, and the design of new drugs. It was booted up for the first time on 12 April 2005, and is now available to the national and international scientific community.^[3]

Mare Nostrum (in Latin, "our sea") was the Roman name for the Mediterranean Sea. The supercomputer is housed in the deconsecrated Chapel Torre Girona^[4] at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain.