Munich, 14 November 2023

For the 20th time, HPCwire, one of the leading publications for news and information about high-performance computing, has selected the winners of the HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards 2023 at the Supercomputing Conference (SC23) in Denver, Colorado (USA).

In the “Top Supercomputing Achievement” category, the readers voted the MareNostrum 5 pre-exascale computer set up by ParTec AG together with Eviden as the best development of the last twelve months in the field of high-performance computing. The system is operated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre in Spain as part of the EuroHPC JU (European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking). With a performance capacity of up to 314 petaflops, i.e. at least 314 million billion calculations per second, MareNostrum 5 is tailored to support medical research in Europe through the development of drugs and vaccines, simulations of virus propagation, artificial intelligence applications and the processing of large amounts of data.

MareNostrum 5 is ranked 8th and 19th in the TOP500 list, making it one of the most powerful and environmentally friendly supercomputers in the world.

The supercomputer in Barcelona consists of two partitions. The accelerated partition of MareNostrum 5 achieved a High Performance Linpack (HPL) performance of 138.2 petaflops, which corresponds to 138.2 million calculations per second. This partition is based on Eviden’s next-generation BullSequana XH3000 hybrid architecture, which integrates GPU nodes with NVIDIA’s H100 Tensor Core GPU, based on the new Hopper™ architecture, with fourth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (codenamed Sapphire Rapids).

The MareNostrum 5 General Purpose Partition, a pure CPU system, shone with an HPL of 40.10 petaflops. This performance is remarkable when you consider that this partition works without any accelerators. This makes the MN5 General Purpose Partition the third most powerful CPU-only system and the most powerful system based on the x86 architecture.

“It is a great honour for us to receive the HPCwire Readers’ Choice Award for the first time in recognition of our community for outstanding breakthroughs in high-performance computing,” explains Hugo Falter, Co-CEO and Chief Operating Officer of ParTec AG, who was presented with the award in Denver. “This underlines ParTec AG’s strength and customer-centric approach in the international HPC ecosystem.”

The 137 awards in 22 categories were presented by Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications. HPCwire established two award categories: (1) Readers’ Choice, where winners were chosen by HPCwire readers, and (2) Editors’ Choice, where winners were selected by a panel of HPCwire editors and thought leaders in the HPC field. The process began with an open nomination process, and voting took place throughout September.

The awards are widely regarded as one of the most prestigious honours that the HPC community bestows on its own members each year. They are the only awards where a global audience of HPC end users can vote.