An immersive reality experience and an analogue installation show the potential of supercomputing at an event that brings the latest technological innovations to the public
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) will have a prominent presence at the new edition of Tech&Play, a festival that aims to bring the latest technological innovations to the public in a fun and educational way. The event will take place at the Fabra i Coats: Creation Factory in Barcelona from 25 to 28 April.
The Tech&Play festival, which this year will explore areas such as robotics, artificial intelligence and immersive realities, is organised by Mobile World Capital Barcelona, with the collaboration of the Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence of the Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service, the Generalitat de Catalunya and the Barcelona City Council, as well as the support of companies such as CaixaBank Group and Damm.
The BSC will offer the public attending the festival two different experiences that will serve to highlight the potential of supercomputing as the main driver of scientific and technological development today, and its ability to respond to major global challenges with the aim of building a more humane and sustainable society in the future.
Immersive experience - Journey to the heart of supercomputing
Journey to the heart of supercomputing" is a 360º immersive experience that reveals the secrets of the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, one of the most complete and versatile machines in the world at the service of the scientific community, which will enable research to advance in all fields thanks to its capacity to perform up to 314,000 (European) billion calculations per second.
This immersive virtual reality experience will allow visitors to step inside MareNostrum 5 and tour its various technologies and systems, guided by a voice that explains how each can help solve different scientific problems.
In a second
'In a second" is an analogue artistic installation (pixel free), funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya, which uses the metaphor of a grain of sand, the element from which the silicon needed to produce the latest generation of chips is extracted, to compare the computing capacity of MareNostrum 5 with that of a mobile phone and that of the population of Catalonia and the entire planet.
Thus, the computations that the entire population of Catalonia could perform in one second are represented by a few grains of sand that have to be examined with a magnifying glass, while the sand that corresponds to the computational capacity of the MareNostrum 5 fills more than 4 cubic metres.