It might look like something out of “Mission: Impossible,” but you don’t have to sneak inside like Ethan Hunt to catch a glimpse of this supercomputer in action.
Located in the main hall of Torre Girona, a chapel dating to the 1940s, the Polytechnic University of Catalonia’s Barcelona Supercomputing Center–Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is home to Spain’s fastest supercomputer: the MareNostrum 4. A joint venture between IBM and the government, the church was deconsecrated and converted for secular use a few decades ago, and it’s gone through several iterations in time since.
Next year, it’s due for yet another upgrade. The new high-performance machine will be one of Europe’s first pre-exascale computers with a price tag of around €223 million, including the purchase price, installation, and the costs of keeping it running for five years, and not only will its capacity be much larger, but the MareNostrum 5 itself will be bigger as well-meaning it’ll soon need an outpost in another building to accommodate the whole thing
“The major challenges of our society – such as studying climate change and developing new energies, like fusion – require exascale computers, which are much more powerful than those that we have now, with features that meet the new needs of researchers and a proportionally lower energy consumption than that of existing computers,” Roberto Viola, director of the BSC-CNS, said in a press release.
It’s a bit incongruous to see such cutting-edge tech in such classic-looking quarters, but interestingly enough, it didn’t require many modifications to transform the decades-old church into a suitable home for the supercomputer. “We were in need of hundreds of square meters without columns and the capacity to support 44.5 tons of weight,” communications head Gemma Maspoch told Vice earlier this year. “The only room that satisfied our requirements was the Torre Girona chapel. We did not doubt it for a moment.”
The centre reinforced the soil around the church to accommodate the heavy computer and designed the glass box to help keep it cool. Today, 2017’s World’s Most Beautiful Data Center is open for public visits and tours, but no drop-ins – you have to schedule an appointment on a weekday between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. (Allow 30 to 60 minutes for your visit.)
For more information, visit bsc.es.
