The MareNostrum is Europe's most powerful (and the world's fourth most powerful) supercomputer as of April 2005 according to the LINPACK benchmark. It was announced by IBM and María Jesús San Segundo , the Spanish Minister of Education and Science . The supercomputer was built with 3,564 IBM PowerPC 970FX processors each running at 2.2 GHz and will have 4,564 processors upon completion. The PowerPC 970 is a 64-bit processor and the processor nodes communicate through Myrinet interconnects. It has 9 TB of RAM and 128 TB of external disk storage.

MareNostrum features BladeCenter JS20 blade servers and uses the Linux operating system. It is capable of 20.53 teraflops and a peak performance of 31.363 teraflops. It occupies only 160 m² (less than half a basketball court) and weighs 40,000 kg. It was largely constructed in two months in Madrid and was installed in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center at the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain.

The computer will be used in human genome research, protein research, weather forecasting and the design of new drugs. It was booted up for the first time on 12 April, 2005, and is now available to the national and international scientific community.

Mare Nostrum (in Latin, "our sea") was the Roman name for the Mediterranean Sea. It is thought to signify not only the location but also the vast power of this computing resource.

References

• November, 2004 Top 500 supercomputer list Retrieved November 9, 2004
• Barcelona Supercomputer Center Retrieved November 9, 2004

See also

• Mare Nostrum

External links

• IBM's MareNostrum page
• Top 500 supercomputers
• IBM Press release
• Power Architecture Community Newsletter, 15 Feb 2005: MareNostrum: A new concept in Linux supercomputing
• Slashdot: Building The MareNostrum COTS Supercomputer