We are proud to highlight the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), Spain’s national supercomputing centre and one of Europe’s leaders in high-performance computing (HPC). BSC manages MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, and provides cutting-edge HPC resources to both the international scientific community and industry.
Since its creation in 2005, BSC has become a world-class hub for multidisciplinary research in Computer Sciences, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences, Computer Applications in Science and Engineering, and Computational Social Sciences and Humanities. The centre has played a pioneering role in shaping the European HPC landscape being one of the hosting entities for the pre-exascale systems of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking. At national level, BSC is active part of the Red Española de Supercomputación (RES) supporting research and innovation of universities and companies.
Role in the Project
BSC leads the Use Cases, Architectural Extensions and Evaluation, where it is responsible for defining, implementing, and validating real-world use cases to demonstrate the capabilities of the HIGHER open-source hardware and software ecosystem. Its contributions include:
- Use Case Development: Focusing its efforts to the Platform as a Service (PaaS) use case, it aims to develop a PaaS environment supporting large-scale data processing across High-Performance Computing (HPC), Machine Learning (ML) inference, and data analytics applications.
- Platform Evaluation: Conducting benchmarking using microbenchmarks, standard cloud suites (e.g., DataBench), and application workloads to evaluate system performance, scalability, and efficiency.
- Software Distribution: Developing and providing an easy-to-deploy software stack, integrated with standard system management tools, to ensure reproducibility and real-world applicability.
- SW/HW Integration and Verification: Ensuring smooth software/hardware co-design and functional validation.
- Standards & Open Access Programme: Ensuring alignment with relevant standards (such as RISC-V ISA) while promoting open access to prototype research platforms deployed at BSC.
By bridging research excellence and industrial application, BSC ensures that HIGHER’s outcomes are validated in real-world environments and are accessible to the broader European community. Its leadership in use-case definition and evaluation is key to demonstrating the project’s value for cloud and edge infrastructures, while also supporting Europe’s long-term vision for open, efficient, and sovereign HPC ecosystems.