BSC-CNS Newsletter July 2023

The six new EuroHPC quantum computers will be integrated into existing supercomputers in Czechia, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain. Representatives of the six hosting entities, the European Commission and EuroHPC JU have signed the hosting agreements. These quantum computers will allow European users to explore a variety of quantum technologies coupled to leading supercomputers.

IBM and BSC bet on European technology development and accelerate knowledge and experience in the region. The agreement will focus on computing systems, user and client applications, open architectures and standards, and education development. As part of this agreement, IBM will provide 3 million Euros in Scholarships for Education and Research activities during 5 years.

Researchers at BSC and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya have developed a tool for research into automatic sign language translation that uses artificial intelligence to break down some of the communication barriers commonly faced by deaf and hard of hearing people. The technology developed uses AI to convert sign language sentences recorded on video into spoken language in text format.

Researchers at BSC are training artificial intelligence models to recognise the symbology and content of the Prado Museum's paintings, and even detect details that may go unnoticed by the human eye. The aim of this project is to generate detailed descriptions of the Prado Museum's paintings that will help to better understand our cultural and historical heritage.

Researchers from the BSC Data Analysis and Visualisation group open the black box of artificial intelligence to better understand how it works. The project analyses the lyrics of artists who have performed at the festival to detect patterns and discover their evolution over time. BSC was also be represented at Sónar+D 2023, by oceanographer Joan Llort, who explained his experience in art and science hybridisation projects

This COMPSs release includes new features, such as a new software cache for GPU tasks and support for containers with MPI and MPMD tasks. The workflow provenance has been extended to support the new Workflow Run Crate profile (v0.1). COMPSs has been assessed with the EOSC-Synergy SQAaaS platform and obtained the silver badge.

The System Tools and Advanced Runtimes (STAR) group) has announced the release of the STAR software stack (version 2023.05), featuring several updates and enhancements. This release includes the OmpSs-2 programming model, Task-Aware libraries (TA-X), the ovni instrumentation and the nOS-V tasking library.

Mitiga Solutions, a BSC spin-off that uses artificial intelligence and HPC to develop technology that improves prevention, resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related risks, has raised €13.25 million in an investment round led by the Spanish fund Kibo Ventures and in which Microsoft, through its Climate Innovation Fund, as well as Nationwide Ventures, Faber Ventures and CREAS Impacto have also participated.

BSC coordinates the Catalan Supercomputing Network (X4HPC), which aims to provide the Catalan supercomputing ecosystem with mechanisms for technology transfer and knowledge valorization. It gathers 23 research groups from 8 leading Catalan institutions that work in the field of supercomputing. The X4HPC Network's mission is to accelerate the valorization and technology transfer of scientific projects that use supercomputing tools.

The researcher Mercè Crosas has joined BSC to lead the new Computational Social Sciences programme, with the aim of promoting research in this field by harnessing the potential of supercomputing, artificial intelligence, and big data analysis. Crosas has a long career at Harvard University in the United States, where she was head of research data management and head of the office of data science and technology at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

The laboratory led by Toni Gabaldón at IRB Barcelona and BSC is exploring an innovative solution that minimises the time and cost of sequencing. The MultiSeq project has received an ERC Proof of Concept grant endowed with €150,000, for a period of 18 months. Over the next three years, the technique will be tested in different environments, market analyses will be carried out, and marketing options will be evaluated.