Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Research and supercomputing facility
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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]
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| Location | Barcelona, Spain |
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| Coordinates | 41°23′22″N 2°6′58″E |
 Interactive map of Barcelona Supercomputing Center | |
| Website | https://www.bsc.es/ |
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]
- Associate director: Josep Maria Martorell[citation needed]
- 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]
- Operations director: Sergi Girona[citation needed]
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.