Barcelona is seeing a strong economic return from the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC), according to its director Mateo Valero. He said that for every euro invested in the centre, about ten euros are generated for the city.
Valero also wants Barcelona to become Europe’s chip design hub. He said the centre helps attract international talent, and that 35% of its 1,400 staff come from around 65 countries.
The BSC’s work goes beyond direct jobs. It brings in national and international projects, supports spin-off companies and helps keep highly skilled people in the city. That, Valero said, strengthens Barcelona’s place in the wider tech sector.
The centre is home to MareNostrum 5, one of Europe’s most powerful pre-exascale supercomputers. It has more than 180 racks and 160 kilometres of cabling, and its computing power is said to match 380,000 mid-to-high-end laptops. Valero said it can do in one hour what a normal computer would take 46 years to complete.
Valero said supercomputing now supports weather prediction, personalised medicine and new materials research. He also argued that Europe needs digital sovereignty, especially in chip production. He said, “Without chips, there is no paradise”, adding that chips are the base layer for hardware and the AI models that run on it.
Recent BSC agreements signed in California with NVIDIA and Supermicro point to Barcelona’s growing profile. Valero said the open RISC-V processor architecture could help chip design grow without relying on large corporations. He also said Barcelona has around 1,500 chip professionals now, and wants that to rise to 5,000 or 6,000.
The BSC’s roots go back to 1985, when Valero secured 10 million pesetas, about 60,000 euros, from the Ministry of Industry to buy a 64-processor machine. That led to the Barcelona European Centre for Parallelism, CEPBA, which later became the BSC. The centre was established 21 years ago and is backed by a consortium of the Spanish government, the Government of Catalonia and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).
