Intel and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to build a lab on the fastest calculation speeds

Barcelona (ACN).- The Spanish IT multinational company Intel and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) have agreed to build a research and development lab to carry out research on the so-called Exascale supercomputing, which run 1,000 faster than the current top computers in the world. The lab will be built in Barcelona, in the BSC facilities. It will join Intel’s European network of R&D facilities, which employ some 1,500 research professionals, and it will be Intel’s fourth European lab working on Exascale technology. Barcelona’s lab will focus on programming and runtime systems of Exaflop supercomputers. It will help to develop extremely complex parallel systems needed for the future of Intel computers. Intel expects to reach Exascale performance within the next ten years.

Some of the practical applications of this technology will be to simulate extremely complex biochemical and health phenomena. For instance, Exascale performance might be used in the fight against cancer or to create very targeted drugs. Besides, the Exascale technology would also have numerous practical applications in numerous scientific fields, such as weather forecasting, climate research and quantum physics.

BSC is a leading centre in Europe

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is already the leading institution in Spain in its field. It was created in 1995 but it confirmed its leadership in 2004, when the Mare Nostrum Supercomputer was built. At that time it was the fastest computer in Europe. The Mare Nostrum supercomputer has been updated since then and, in 2010, it was ranked the 118^th fastest computer in the world, reaching 94.21 Teraflops, which means 94.21 trillion operations per second using its 10,240 processors.