The Barcelona Supercomputing Center had an initial operational budget of €5.5 million/year (about US$7 million/year) to cover the period of 2005–2011. The center has had a very rapid growth and in 2018 had a workforce of around 600 workers and an annual global budget of more than 34 million euros.[5]
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center has participated in the development of public artificial-intelligence infrastructure for Spanish and Spain's co-official languages. The ALIA initiative, launched under Spain's national artificial intelligence strategy, provides open language models and related resources for Spanish, Catalan, Valencian, Basque and Galician.[12]
The project uses the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, located and managed by BSC, for training and deploying generative AI models.[13] In 2025, the Aina project announced the Salamandra family of models, developed by BSC, including 2B, 7B and 40B parameter versions. According to the project, Salamandra was trained from scratch using MareNostrum 5 and includes training data covering 35 European languages.[14]
A 2025 agreement published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado identified BSC-CNS as the beneficiary and coordinator of the ALIA project, whose work programme includes the development of high-quality corpora, foundation language models, evaluation datasets and secure training infrastructure for language technologies.[15]
BSC's Language Technologies Unit has published research on multilingual and translation-oriented language models, including the Salamandra and SalamandraTA model families.
In popular culture
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center appears in Dan Brown's 2017 science fiction mystery thriller novel Origin, as the home of the E-Wave device.
