Pick BSC for a public-sector, Apache-licensed language model built around Iberian languages, or for European HPC capacity through RES and EuroHPC. It reports over 1,000 staff from 60 countries and ships its models as free downloads, not as a paid API.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) is Spain's national supercomputing centre, established in 2005 in Barcelona. It operates the pre-exascale MareNostrum 5 and publishes the open-weights Salamandra and ALIA language models under the Apache licence, with post-training aimed at Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Galician and English.
Founded: 2005 · HQ: Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain · Team: 1000+ · CEO: Mateo Valero · Funding: Public consortium (Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities; Catalan Departament de Recerca i Universitats; UPC) plus EU and national research grants
About Barcelona Supercomputing Center
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center, officially Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), is the national supercomputing centre of Spain. It was established in 2005 and is based in Barcelona. Three shareholding institutions govern it: the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the Catalan Departament de Recerca i Universitats and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Mateo Valero is the Director and Cristian Canton the Associate Director, according to the centre's own governance page.
BSC operates MareNostrum 5, a pre-exascale EuroHPC supercomputer with a total peak of 314 PFlops. Its accelerated partition has 1,120 nodes with four NVIDIA Hopper GPUs each (260 PFlops peak), and its general-purpose partition has 6,480 Intel Sapphire Rapids nodes (45.9 PFlops). An AI upgrade partition adds 336 NVL4 nodes, each with two NVIDIA Grace CPUs and four Blackwell GB200 GPUs, for large-scale training and inference.
The centre states its mission as researching, implementing, managing and transferring technology and knowledge in high performance computing, with an emphasis on computer, life, earth and engineering sciences. Research is organised in five fields: Computer Sciences, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences, Computer Applications in Science and Engineering, and Computational Social Sciences and Humanities. BSC also manages the Red Española de Supercomputación (RES) and hosts EuroHPC JU resources. Its human resources page reports more than 1,000 staff from 60 countries.
In AI, the Language Technologies Laboratory publishes open-weights language models on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 licence. The Salamandra family (2B and 7B base and instruct models, first published on 30 September 2024) and the larger ALIA family (the 40B base model appeared in December 2024 and ALIA-40b-instruct-2601 in January 2026) were trained on MareNostrum 5. The team documents Salamandra in a public technical report (arXiv 2502.08489) and ships all training scripts and configuration files on GitHub. The ALIA work is funded by the Spanish Ministry for Digital Transformation through the NextGenerationEU project Modelos del Lenguaje and backed by the Government of Catalonia through the Aina Project.
BSC does not sell model access. The weights are free downloads, and self-hosting is the main route. Among open European model builders it differs from commercial labs such as Mistral AI and Aleph Alpha and from the research institute Ai2 (maker of Olmo 3.1 32B Think) because it is a public centre whose post-training targets Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Galician and English. Another Spain-based AI group in the directory, Multiverse Computing, compresses existing models rather than training new ones.
Mission
To research, implement, manage and transfer technology and knowledge in high performance computing to facilitate progress in a variety of scientific fields.
Products
- MareNostrum 5 (Pre-exascale supercomputer (EuroHPC)): https://www.bsc.es/marenostrum/marenostrum-5
- ALIA and Salamandra language models (Open-weights LLMs (Apache 2.0)): https://huggingface.co/BSC-LT
- Red Española de Supercomputación (RES) (National HPC access network): https://www.res.es
Barcelona Supercomputing Center Models on HokAI
Links
Frequently Asked Questions
How is the Barcelona Supercomputing Center funded?
BSC is publicly owned by three shareholders: the Spanish science ministry, the Catalan research and universities department and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Its research also runs on EU programmes, Spanish and Catalan public calls and collaborations with companies. The ALIA models were funded through the NextGenerationEU project Modelos del Lenguaje. BSC has no venture rounds and publishes no valuation.
What does BSC offer to AI teams in 2026?
It offers free open-weights models on Hugging Face (Salamandra and ALIA, Apache 2.0) and supercomputing time on MareNostrum 5 through RES and EuroHPC allocation calls. It lists no per-token price because it runs no hosted model API. The cost of the weights is hardware and electricity only.
Does BSC publish security certifications for its models?
No SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certificate appears on the BSC model pages we checked. The ALIA-40b-instruct card places risk assessment and EU AI Act compliance on the team deploying the model. Anyone with regulated data should run their own review.
Who competes with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in open models?
Mistral AI and Aleph Alpha sell commercial European models, so they win on hosted APIs and enterprise support. Ai2 wins on fully documented research releases such as Olmo. BSC wins on Catalan, Basque and Galician coverage and on a public mandate, and loses on tool use and agent features, which its own model card lists as unsupported.
How do you start using BSC's models?
Download a checkpoint from huggingface.co/BSC-LT and serve it with vLLM, or with llama.cpp for the GGUF build. BSC's card for the 40B instruct model advises low temperatures (0 to 0.2) and discourages Ollama. Researchers who need compute can apply for MareNostrum 5 time through RES.