Some exciting things are happening in Barcelona, Spain. In order of presumed interest to LinuxWorld readers, these are:

MareNostrum, the fifth fastest supercomputer in the world, which runs SuSE Linux on over 2,000 IBM blades, was recently christened in Barcelona.

Barcelona is undertaking a massive (approximately 1 square mile) urban revitalization program of an all-but-abandoned textile manufacturing district right in the center of the city, transforming it into a world-class Technology Park (www.bcn.es/22@bcn).

The Spanish government is moving their equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission from Madrid, the nation's capitol, to Barcelona. Given the historic rivalry between these two cities, this move packs the emotional equivalence of the New York Yankees moving to Boston.

Taken together, these initiatives position Barcelona at the vanguard of an economic renaissance built on the belief that the prosperity and well being of future generations will be attained through the advancement of knowledge. The crown jewel in this strategy is clearly the MareNostrum supercomputer.

MareNostrum, which means "our sea" in Latin (referring to the Mediterranean), is run by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (www.BSC.es), a joint venture of the Spanish central government, the regional government of Catalonia, and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, or UPC. Constructed out of 2,400 IBM JS20 blade servers running SuSE 9 Linux, MareNostrum went from design to "On" in less than 8 months.

Projects under way at BSC are pushing back the clouds of ignorance in areas as diverse as bioinformation, earth sciences, and fluid dynamics. And requests are pouring in from around Spain and Europe to leverage MareNostrum's mammoth smarts to unlock mysteries as diverse as which genes are behind the world's deadliest diseases to determining with greater certainty the potential impacts of, and contributors to, global warming.

Not Your Father's Supercomputer
The true significance of MareNostrum, however, goes well beyond its stature as the fastest computer in Europe, though this is in and of itself newsworthy. It goes beyond even the life-changing impact that the research done with its massive 27.91 Teraflops (trillion floating-point calculations per second) of processing power will have on the people of Spain, Europe, and the World, though this, too, is material for several articles. The true significance of MareNostrum lies in the fact that it heralds a new era in the accessibility of massive computing power to provide answers to the world's most vexing questions. This accessibility of supercomputing power marks a watershed event, an "inflection point," as the BSC's Felipe Lozano put it, in the impact that supercomputing power will have on society.

MareNostrum is situated in the public domain. Contrast this with the Earth Simulator, the world's fourth fastest supercomputer. Its name alone points to the most profound difference between MareNostrum and it, and most other top-ranked supercomputers before MareNostrum: that is, the majority of previous systems have been purpose-built to advance science related to a specific area of study. This is true of NASA's Columbia, the third fastest, and of the U.S. Department of Energy's Thunder, the seventh fastest. (Notable exceptions to this rule are the several university-based supercomputers in the Top 500, such as Virgina Tech's Dual 2.3GHz Apple Xserve system (ranked 14th on the Top 500), the San Diego Supercomputer Center (43rd). These centers typically are available to academic researchers either on a per-use fee basis and/or whose projects are funded by grants and awards.)

Fasten Seatbelts
Think of application-specific supercomputers as the equivalent of air travel before the arrival of airlines, before air routes, before air traffic control, and before airports. Back then, air travel was reserved for the elite few who could afford not only an airplane, but a staff to maintain and fly it, facilities to store it, and purpose-built space on which to land and takeoff. Were planes back then fast relative to the other modes of transportation? You bet. Were they a quantum leap forward in transportation? Yes. But aviation technology did not, indeed could not, have the massive impact on society that it has had until air travel became accessible to more of society. And this did not occur until three key things happened, which together resulted in an air travel boom:

• Supply: The availability of comfortable, reliable, large, fast, safe, and efficient planes increased air system capacity and brought airfares down.
• Demand: Passenger interest in air travel rose as people began to see applications for this transportation mode for their own business and personal lives, and lower prices made it affordable.
• A little help from Uncle Sam: Governments reduced the cost and risk of running an airline by using taxpayer dollars to build airports and by regulating market entry.

In this context, MareNostrum is part of a revolution in supercomputing equivalent to the arrival of airlines, to the supply of airplanes built for transporting passengers, and to the decision by governments to ensure that air travel would, ahem, take off. Each of the three factors that contributed to greater accessibility of air travel, and to its subsequent boom, can be seen in the MareNostrum project.

Supply
Just as advances in aeronautical science allowed larger planes to carry more people faster while consuming less fuel, so too is computational science increasing the number of processes per second while simultaneously reducing footprint and power consumption. The computers that comprise MareNostrum, IBM's BladeCenter JS20, are certainly advanced. With two 2.2 Gigahertz (GHz) PowerPC 970 FX chips on each hot-swappable blade, they feature integrated 2-port Gigabit Ethernet, 4GB of memory per node, Fiber Channel expansion capability, and a host of reliability and management features. What is equally impressive about this technology is that it is available for any business to purchase. Having been designed for commercial use means that the JS20, like other blade solutions on the market today, is reliable, efficient, and compact: all requirements of the business computing market.

For the builders of MareNostrum, this meant that, unlike other supercomputers that must be housed in large, custom, and expensive facilities (just the building that houses DoE's Thunder cost over $50 Million), MareNostrum faced far fewer restrictions. This is a key contributor to the accessibility factor: without the need for elaborate and expensive facilities, a major barrier to implementing supercomputing power is torn down. Thus freed from these facilities shackles, the Catalan's aesthetic flair was on full display with their selection of a renovated cathedral to be MareNostrum's home.

Computational Performance - It's the System, Stupid...
As important as the commercial availability of efficient and powerful systems was to MareNostrum's success, advances in coordinating the massive quantities of processing power were equally important. MareNostrum utilizes a Myrinet Fiber Channel grid communication system that allows each blade's processors to communicate with any other blade's processors at a rate of four gigabits per second. To ensure that all the system's processors work together, tasks must be divided into 4,800 equal parts and each processor then writes its results to a shared hard drive memory system. (Smaller tasks that do not require the entire MareNostrum system are divided into equal parts equivalent to the number of processors they will be using. In this way, MareNostrum can work simultaneously on several different projects.)