4,480 Hopper accelerators in Barcelona
On 21 December 2023 Spain's prime minister Pedro Sanchez inaugurated MareNostrum 5 at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. The accelerated partition, built by Eviden, carries 4,480 NVIDIA Hopper accelerators and measured 138.20 petaflops on Linpack against a peak of 265.57, eighth in the world. The machine's combined peak is 314 petaflops.
Why it matters
This closed the first generation of EuroHPC machines: eight systems under the programme, three of them in the world's top ten. For Europe it is the first state accelerator pool of this size on H100s, meaning the first chance to train a large model without buying time from a cloud.
The machine is built on the BullSequana XH3000 from Eviden and on Lenovo ThinkSystem architecture; the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking owns it and the consortium is led by Spain with Portugal and Turkey. The accelerated partition reached a peak of 260 petaflops and the Lenovo general-purpose partition on Sapphire Rapids processors 45.4 petaflops and nineteenth place on Linpack. In the November 2023 TOP500 list the accelerated partition held 680,960 cores and drew 2,560 kilowatts. On the money. The report gave 202 million euros as the cost of the system. The BSC page separates the two: 202 million is the total cost, the largest investment Europe has made in a scientific infrastructure in Spain, of which 151.4 million is the acquisition of the machine itself; the EuroHPC release names around 151 million, that second figure. The numbers do not contradict each other but denote different things. What the record does not claim. Access for European scientists and industry through EuroHPC calls was still ahead on the day of the opening: the release says it comes from the start of the following year.