MareNostrum provides 470 million core hours to European scientists

08 May 2018

The Spanish supercomputer MareNostrum 4 has once again provided the most computing time in a PRACE call.

In the 16th PRACE Call for Project Access, Spain has allocated 470 million core hours on MareNostrum to 17 projects led by scientists from different European countries. With this allocation, this is the second time in a row that this unique supercomputer – which is installed in a chapel – has been the largest contributor in number of core hours in the last two PRACE Call for Proposals.

This includes projects in cooperation with large research facilities and with industry, and will be running on BSC’s supercomputer from 3 April 2018 to 31 March 2019, for example:

  • an industry-academia collaboration that has allocated 56.7 million core hours. Led by Dr. Andrea Hahmann from TU Denmark, the project titled “NEWA-ProRun: New European Wind Atlas Production Run” will involve Fraunhofer IWES, Germany and WeatherTech Scandinavia AB, Sweden;
  • led by Prof. Blanca Rodriguez from Oxford University, the project titled “In silico drug trials in the beating ischaemic human heart” received 54.6 million core hours;
  • led by Dr. Yolanda Prezado from CNRS, the project titled “New approaches in radiotherapy: hadron minibeam radiation therapy” received 16 million core hours, in collaboration with the ALBA synchrotron research infrastructure.

PRACE awards 130 million core hours to Spanish scientists

Of the 44 proposals awarded in this PRACE Call, Spanish scientists were allocated 130 million core hours in six different projects, to run on Europe’s HPC infrastructure PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, where the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is a Hosting Member.

“From a total of seven eligible Spanish proposals, six were awarded. Once again, this is very good news for the Spanish scientific community who use European HPC resources,” says Sergi Girona, BSC Operations Director and PRACE Council delegate for Spain. Amongst them, the three largest projects with most allocated core hours are:

  • led by Prof. Francisco Doblas-Reyes from BSC, the project titled “HiResNTCP: High-resolution near-term climate predictions” received 33 million core hours;
  • led by Dr. Oriol Lehmkuhl from BSC, the project titled “VIVALdI: HPC of Vortex Induced VibrAtions for flow controL and energy harvestIng” received 27 million core hours;
  • led by Prof. Carlos Pena from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, the project titled “HFlavLat: Precision Heavy Flavour Physics from Lattice QCD” received 23 million core hours.

About PRACE

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is an international non-profit association with its seat in Brussels. The PRACE Research Infrastructure provides a persistent world-class high performance computing service for scientists and researchers from academia and industry in Europe. The computer systems and their operations accessible through PRACE are provided by 5 PRACE members (BSC representing Spain, CINECA representing Italy, CSCS representing Switzerland, GCS representing Germany and GENCI representing France). The Implementation Phase of PRACE receives funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (2014-2020) under grant agreement 730913. For more information, see www.prace-ri.eu.