Visit to Barcelona Supercomputing Center - MareNostrum 5 & Quantum Computers
Fascinating visit to the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) where I had the opportunity to see MareNostrum 5, one of Europe's most powerful supercomputers, and two quantum computers (Blue and Red systems). MareNostrum 5 delivers 314 petaflops of performance and is housed in a stunning chapel. The quantum computers represent the cutting edge of quantum computing research in Spain.
Visiting the Barcelona Supercomputing Center
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) is Spain's national supercomputing centre and one of the leading high-performance computing (HPC) centres in Europe. I had the chance to visit it and see up close the machines that power some of the most demanding research in the continent.
MareNostrum 5: one of Europe's most powerful supercomputers
The star of the visit was MareNostrum 5, with a peak performance of 314 petaflops. It is used for everything from climate modelling and drug discovery to training large AI models.
Standing next to it puts the scale of modern computing into perspective: rows of racks, advanced cooling and an enormous amount of engineering dedicated to a single goal, running scientific calculations as fast as possible.
Quantum computers at BSC
We also saw two of BSC's quantum computers. Quantum computing works on completely different principles from classical computers and promises to tackle problems, like certain simulations and optimisation tasks, that are out of reach today.
It is still an early-stage technology, but seeing working quantum hardware in Barcelona shows that the research is happening here, not just in Silicon Valley.
Why compute matters for applied AI
Every AI model I use in my work, from computer vision to language models, exists because someone had access to massive amounts of compute to train it. Supercomputers like MareNostrum are the infrastructure behind that progress.
The good news for businesses is that you don't need a supercomputer to benefit. The heavy lifting happens once, during training; companies can then use those models through the cloud and focus on applying them to their own problems.
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