Urban Planning
Building a city's digital twin before pouring a single foundation.
Image: Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress
Simulating Reality at City Scale
A digital twin of a megacity couples traffic microsimulation, energy demand modeling, and building-scale CFD into a single evolving model that mirrors the real city in near real time. Predictive resource management — water, power, transit capacity — depends on running thousands of what-if scenarios against that twin before committing physical infrastructure. Malgukke's pre-exascale architectures are built to hold both the fine-grained physical models and the coarse-grained agent-based population layers that a true urban digital twin requires.
HPC Solution Architecture: Sensor Data to Urban Digital Twin
A city-scale simulation pipeline, comparable to workflows run at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center:
Running on the TOP500: MareNostrum 5
MareNostrum 5, hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), entered the TOP500 list at 8th place in November 2023 with a peak performance of 314 petaflops. Its Computer Applications in Science and Engineering department, led by José María Cela, runs simulation software that models real-world urban, industrial, and environmental conditions — the exact digital-twin methodology described on this page.
Yes — this is a real, currently operating top-10 TOP500 system, directly used by BSC researchers for the urban and engineering simulation workloads described here.
Voices from the Field
José María Cela
Head, Computer Applications in Science and Engineering, Barcelona Supercomputing Center
On how MareNostrum lets his department simulate reality — mimicking real urban and industrial conditions in an hour instead of years.
Read articleEuroHPC Joint Undertaking
European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking
On MareNostrum 5's role as one of three EuroHPC systems in the global top 10, purpose-built to serve a broad spectrum of scientific workloads.
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