The BSC-CNS was officially constituted in 2005 by the General Administration of the State, the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). Its specialty is high-performance computing, also known as HPC, and its function is twofold: to offer infrastructure and service in supercomputing to Spanish and European scientists, and to generate knowledge and technology to transfer them to society.
The BSC-CNS is a Severo Ochoa Center of Excellence, a first-level member of the European research infrastructure PRACE and coordinator of the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES). It provides the RES with its two most powerful machines:PaulNostrum and MinoTaurus.
PaulNostrum is a machine that consists of 4 partitions, which provide 13.8 Pflops/s of calculation capacity between all of them. The RES offers its two most powerful partitions, the general purpose one, with x86 processors (with 165,888 cores), capable of providing more than 11.15 Pflops/s of computing capacity, and the power9 processors (2160 cores) with Nvidia V100 GPU accelerators (216 GPUS), providing a maximum computing capacity of 1.6 Pflops/s.
Besides, MinoTauro is also provided, which is a heterogeneous machine that provides its maximum calculation capacity thanks to its graphic accelerators (GPUS), which provide it with more than 251 Tflops/s.
The BSC-CNS provides the RES with 40% PaulNostrum x86 plus 22% PaulNostrum power9+GPUs (a total of about 460 million computing hours per year) and 60% MinoTaurus (more than two million computing hours per year).
