The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) was established in 2005 and is a key element of and coordinates the Spanish Supercomputing Network, which is the main framework for granting competitive HPC time to Spanish research institutions. Furthermore, BSC-CNS is one of six hosting nodes in France, Germany, Italy and Spain that form the core of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) network. PRACE provides competitive computing time on world-class supercomputers to researchers in the 25 European member countries. 

The Center houses Mare Nostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe with 48,128 cores and 1.1 Pflops capacity. The mission of BSC is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC combines HPC service provision, and R&D into both computer and computational science (life, earth and engineering sciences) under one roof and currently has over 450 staff from 44 countries. BSC has collaborated with industry since its creation, and participates in various bilateral joint research centers with companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Intel, NVIDIA and Spanish oil company Repsol. The Center has been extremely active in the EC Framework Programs and has participated in over 100 projects funded by it. BSC is a founding member of HiPEAC, the ETP4HPC and other international fora.

The ES-BSC activities with the focus on global climate modelling and prediction are based on research, development and predictions with the EC-Earth climate forecast system. EC-Earth is the state-of-the art coupled climate model that is being developed and used for climate predictions and projections by the European consortium of more than 20 research and operational institutions from European Centre for Mid-range weather Forecasts (ECMWF is provider of the atmospheric and land components) to ES-BSC. Beside contributing to the 5th phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CIMP5) critical for the UN IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), global climate research activities at ES-BSC enable provision of various historical reconstructions and initial conditions to the EC-Earth community for analysis of climate dynamics and for seasonal to decadal climate predictions. The ES-BSC is a contributor to the IS- ENES FP7 European project fostering the integration of the European climate modelling community and the development of Earth System Models (ESM) for advancing the understanding and predictions of climate variability and change. The ES-BSC is already active in the planning and design of the future coupled climate model intercomparison project, CIMP6, and is preparing to make key contributions including the groundbreaking high-resolution climate simulations with EC-Earth.