The mission of the Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC) is to investigate, develop and manage technology to facilitate the advancement of science, explained Professor Labarta. BSC aims at performing R&D in Supercomputing and Computer Architecture and is collaborating in R&D e-Science. To this end, BSC operates a number of supercomputers, one of which is the MareNostrum. The MareNostrum Consortium includes the Spanish Government (MEC), the Catalonian Government (DURSI), and the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC).

MareNostrum achieves a peak performance of 40 TFlop/s and is since November 2004 the number one in Europe. The system consists of 4.564 PowerPC 970 FX processors or 2282 2-way nodes. It has 9 TB of memory or 4 GB per node. MareNostrum provides a storage capacity of 236 TB and has three networks, namely Myrinet, Gigabit and 10/100 Ethernet. The operating system is Linux with the Linux kernel version 2.6.

Professor Labarta went on to say that it took only ten months from concept to execution. MareNostrum has been built out of commodity components and technologies including integration and push. The system offers record cluster density and power efficiency and demonstrates a solid balance between price and performance.

Technologies used for the hardware include PPC 970 FX processors, BladeCenter, Myrinet network, and I/O. The system's processors function at 2.2 GHz with 64 bit PowerPC implementation and VMX extensions. Other features are 10 pipelined functional units; and 80 GPR, FPR, and VRF renaming register. The L1 has a 64KB Instruction and 32KB of data whereas the L2 cache provides 512KB. There is support for large pages up to 16MB.

Professor Labarta showed that MareNostrum has 29 racks, one rack consisting of 6 blade centers. One BladeCenter has 14 blades and one blade provides 2 way SMP, 4GB and 40GB of disk.

The software is diskless, runs MPI and has Linux as the operating system as cited before. Professor Labarta also mentioned the Load Leveler and GPFS. The speaker also focused on the Myrinet hardware saying that there are 2268 fiber links to switch and showing the Myrinet structure.

MareNostrum also has 256 blades or storage servers. The storage subsystem provides 140TB or 20 times 7TB storage server nodes. Each storage server node consists of 2 p615; 1 FAStT 100 controller with 3.5TB; and 1 EXP100 SATA drawer with 3.5TB. There are 3 nodes per rack. Professor Labarta gave a general overview of MareNostrum's impressive floorplan.

Professor Labarte showed the MareNostrum results against those of BlueGene/L and the Earth Simulator. Although MareNostrum is still the lesser god of these three systems, the machine offers major services in IT research and various development projects. As such MareNostrum focuses on deep computing with its many performance tools, the ability for parallel programming, and Grid computing.

The main areas in e-Science for which the system is deployed are the life sciences including computational biology and computational chemistry; the Earth sciences such as hydrology, climatology and astronomy; the social sciences with economics, finances, and urbanistics; and physics and engineering including material sciences and computational fluid dynamics, as the speaker concluded and he suggested the Gaudi Cathedral in Barcelona as the next spot to install a new supercomputer.