MareNostrum 5 supercomputer officially inaugurated - ParTec AG plays a key role in successful realisation

Munich, 21 December 2023 - In order to provide Europe with a world-leading supercomputing infrastructure, EuroHPC JU, a European supercomputing initiative launched by the European Union together with European countries in 2018, has already acquired five peta-flop supercomputers and three pre-exascale Supercomputers across Europe: MareNostrum 5 at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) in Spain is besides “LUMI” in Finland and “LEONARDO” in Italy the third pre-exascale system which has now been officially inaugurated.

Intel Sapphire Rapids and Nvidia Hopper - all of these are built into the new MareNostrum 5, catapulting the supercomputer into 8th and 19th place in the latest TOP500 list of the most powerful and into 6^th and 80^th place in the latest GREEN500 list of the most environmentally friendly supercomputers in the world.

As a subcontractor in this 151.4-million-euro project, ParTec AG made a decisive contribution to the successful implementation of the system. ParTec's project managers focused primarily on technical management and project management, such as coordinating suppliers, technical site preparation, network management and responsibility for the software stack for cluster management - all key tasks for the fulfilment of the contract between the customer EuroHPC, the hosting site Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the vendor Atos.

With a computing power of up to 314 PetaFLOPS and thanks to its unique computational architecture, MareNostrum5 will enable an increase in knowledge in fields as diverse as the development of digital twins of the Earth or the human body, research into climate change and the advancement of personalized medicine, the design of more sustainable cities and the search for new materials.

Through a collaboration agreement which is in effect until 2025, ParTec AG is also involved in two research projects together with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center: the development of artificial intelligence models to predict an application’s performance on novel architectures using the Extrae profiling tool; and dynamic resource allocation and usage for applications to improve resource management and energy optimization via the Energy Aware Runtime (EAR) software.

About MareNostrum 5:

MareNostrum 5 is a pre-exascale EuroHPC supercomputer operated at BSC-CNS. The system is supplied by Bull SAS and combines Bull Sequana XH3000 with Lenovo ThinkSystem architectures and has a total computing power of 314 PetaFLOPS. The system offers 4 partitions with different technical features, which together can fulfil the requirements of all HPC users.

MareNostrum 5's accelerated partition achieved a High Performance Linpack (HPL) performance of 138.2 petaflops, which equates to 138.2 million billion calculations per second. This partition is based on Eviden's next-generation BullSequana XH3000 hybrid architecture, which utilizes GPU nodes with NVIDIA's H100 Tensor Core GPU, based on the new Hopper™ architecture, with fourth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (codenamed Sapphire Rapids).

The MareNostrum 5 General Purpose Partition, a pure CPU system, has an HPL of 40.10 PetaFLOPS. This performance is remarkable when you consider that this partition works without any accelerators. This makes the MN5 General Purpose Partition the third most powerful CPU-only system and the most powerful system based on the x86 architecture.