Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Barcelona Supercomputing Center–Centro Nacional de Supercomputación is a public research consortium in Barcelona. It develops language models and coordinates ALIA, Spain's public programme for AI resources in Spanish and co-official languages. Its role includes model training and research, as well as operation of the computing systems used for that work.
Company & leadership
- Founding institutions
- Spain's Ministry of Education and Science, the Government of Catalonia and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
- Institutional form
- Public consortium; the Spanish state administration, Government of Catalonia and UPC remain the financing partners named in the 2025 government notice.
- Director
- Mateo Valero Cortés. His appointment was renewed on 25 February 2025; an official notice published in January 2026 also identifies him as director.
- Model research unit
- Language Technologies Laboratory at BSC; the official releases identify BSC's language and speech teams.
A public research centre with three founding institutions
The 2005 agreement created BSC-CNS to establish, equip and operate Spain's national supercomputing centre. The signatories were public institutions, rather than individual startup founders. The centre's legal structure is a consortium. A director and governing bodies manage its work; a private-company ownership table would not describe this structure.
The September 2025 financing notice records continued participation by the state administration, Catalan government and UPC. It describes growth in the centre's activities around MareNostrum 5, quantum computing and AI. This links BSC's language-model work to a wider research infrastructure mission.
Leadership and institutional continuity
A published agreement records the governing council's renewal of Mateo Valero's appointment in February 2025. A second official document published in January 2026 again names him as BSC director and places the institution in Barcelona. These sources support the research-centre title of director; they do not establish a separate corporate CEO role.
From language research to public model releases
The Salamandra technical report describes decoder-only models in 2B, 7B and 40B classes. It presents multilingual pretraining, instruction tuning and evaluation as a shared research programme. The work addresses European languages rather than relying only on an English language model with a translated interface.
On 20 January 2025, the Spanish government announced the first publicly available ALIA models. The programme aims to support research and services in Spanish and co-official languages. This announcement concerns the wider ALIA initiative; it is not the release date of every later model carrying the ALIA name.
The ALIA site identifies BSC-CNS as coordinator, with leadership from the State Secretariat for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence. Its resources include models, data, methods and evaluation material. MareNostrum 5 provides the computing used in the programme. ALIA is therefore broader than the ALIA-40B checkpoint family.
Models covered by this profile
The catalog below covers documented language, translation, vision, speech and moderation releases. It includes older AINA models when BSC's own cards establish their training contribution. Quantized files and runtime conversions stay with their underlying release. Coverage is incomplete: separate encoders, vocoders, private experiments and some RAG research branches still need individual review.
Practical guidance. Some public cards contain conflicting architecture or training text. Affected entries state the gap and use the model configuration only where it is publicly available. The profile does not assume that a hosted demonstration, a repository name or an inference example establishes an independent trained model.