The Heavenly Data Center

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación, considered one of the most beautiful data centers in the world, is a public research center located in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It hosts MareNostrum, a 1,017.04 TFLOPS Xeon E5649-based supercomputer that, in November 2015, was ranked 93rd in the world.

Why heavenly? Because this data center is located in a former 1920’s Christian Chapel, named Torre Girona, at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). Established on April 1, 2005, it is managed by a consortium composed of the Spanish Ministry of Economy (60%), the Government of Catalonia (30%) and the UPC (10%). The professor Mateo Valero is its main administrator. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center which has contributed to the development of the IBM Cell microprocessor architecture, has an initial operational budget of €5.5 million/year (about US$7 million/year) to cover the period 2005–2011.

Once inside, you will see that the MareNostrum supercomputer is contained inside an enormous glass box. This supercomputer installed in 2004 with more than 10,000 processors to process 94 trillion operations per second is now 25 times more powerful (capable to process more than 1 quadrillion operations per second). In other words, this computer could make in an hour what a regular computer would do in a year… Well that’s more than impressive! One more thing: Do not go to the mass over there to ADDRESS YOUR PRAYERS! It’s not a Chapel anymore and you do not have the necessary credentials to get in! Say your Alleluia at home! A Word to Salvation!