The Barcelona Supercomputing Center–National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) was officially established in 2005 by the General Administration of the State, the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (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 Centre of Excellence, a first level member of the European research infrastructure PRACE and coordinator of the RES. It provides the RES with its two most powerful machines: Paul- Nostrum and MinoTauro.
PaulNostrum is a general-purpose machine with x86 processors (with 49,568 cores), capable of providing more than 1.1 Pflops/s of calculation capacity.
MinoTauro is a heterogeneous machine that provides its maximum calculation capacity thanks to its graphic accelerators (GPUS), which provide it with more than 180 Tflops/s. The BSC-CNS offers the RES 24% of PaulNostrum (about 80 million hours of computation per year) and 60% of MinoTaurus (more than six million hours of computation per year).
