From the archive · 26 October 2009

A visit to MareNostrum

October 2009: the Barcelona Supercomputing Center opens its doors — a supercomputer inside a chapel. We left with our yardstick recalibrated.

Few technical rooms in the world command respect like the BSC’s: the MareNostrum supercomputer installed inside the Torre Girona chapel. In October 2009 we were lucky enough to visit it and to be shown the whole installation — compute, cooling, power.

We did not work there; we were guests — we looked, and we learned. But some visits recalibrate a technical team’s yardstick for good. This was one of them.

Visitor in front of the MareNostrum glass enclosure with racks of green LEDs and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center sign

Rear of the supercomputer's cabinets with dense bundles of orange cables organised into panels

IBM eServer cabinet with a Barcelona Supercomputing Center sign and orange network cabling at the rear

Stulz precision cooling unit with filter grilles and red fire-suppression piping in the data centre

Aisle between black cabinets with a rack of nodes with coloured LEDs at the far end, the visitor reflected in the glass

Side row of racks behind the sloping glass enclosure, with blue-LED nodes on perforated raised flooring

Front of the compute-node cabinets behind the glass, inside the exposed-brick Torre Girona chapel

Detail of cooling ducts and pipework beneath the data centre's raised floor

Today, in 2026

The lesson of MareNostrum was not its size: it was the discipline of the installation. Every cable, every airflow, every watt with a purpose. It is the standard we aspire to in every rack we build.

On-site servers →

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