BSC-CNS Newsletter May 2018

BSC to host the RISC-V Workshop in Barcelona

BSC and UPC are hosting the RISC-V Workshop in Barcelona, gathering the open source processor design community to share RISC-V updates, projects and implementations. More than 300 delegates from all over the world will be attending this event to explore this disruptive technology. BSC is promoting the development of RISC-V-based HPC accelerators in Europe.

BSC researcher Eduard Porta is co-first author of two PanCancer Atlas articles

Cell journal has published the results of the largest cancer project in the world, which studies 33 types of tumour using genomic data from 11,000 patients. Eduard Porta, a researcher currently based in the life sciences department at BSC, is the co-first author of two of the papers and who contributed to a third.

Doblas-Reyes, selected to participate in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has selected 721 experts from 90 countries to participate in the preparation of the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). The BSC Earth sciences director, Francisco J. Doblas-Reyes, is one of 14 Spanish experts selected and will coordinate chapter 10 in the working group I on physical science basis, “Linking global to regional climate change".

Atlantic Ocean circulation at weakest point in more than 1,600 years

New research led provides evidence that a key cog in the global ocean circulation system hasn’t been running at peak strength since the mid-1800s and is currently at its weakest point in the past 1,600 years. BSC researcher Pablo Ortega is coauthor of the paper published in Nature.

Gaia creates richest star map of our galaxy- and beyond

ESA’s Gaia mission has produced the richest star catalogue to date. The new data release includes positions, distance indicators and motions of more than one billion stars, along with high-precision measurements of asteroids within our Solar System and stars beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. BSC is one of the data processing centres that participates in Gaia.

BSC article in the Top 100 Scientific Reports in 2017

The research article ‘Potential ash impact from Antarctic volcanoes: Insights from Deception Island's most recent eruption’ has been selected as one of the top 100 read Earth sciences papers for Scientific Reports in 2017. The authors are Alejandro Martí and Arnau Folch, researchers in the Environmental Simulations group at BSC, together with A. Geyer and S. Giralt from the ICTJA-CSIC.

RoMol presents its main achievements

RoMol project presented its conclusions at the final Workshop of the project that brought together the best computer architects to Barcelona. RoMoL has introduced the novel concept of Runtime-Aware Architectures, a massively parallel architecture designed from the perspective of the runtime of parallel programming models. This approach towards parallel architectures offers a single solution that could solve most of the problems we encounter in the current approaches.

BSC launches the Bioinfo4Women. Outstanding Young Female Bioinformaticians Programme

Bioinfo4Women aims to promote the exchange of knowledge and experience of outstanding young researchers in science and technology though trainings and mentoring. Through the programme, the centre seeks to give greater visibility to the contribution of women in different fields of science, with a particular focus on the areas of personalised medicine, bioinformatics and HPC.

Two BSC projects selected within the MIT-Spain "la Caixa" Foundation Seed Fund

The new MIT-Spain "la Caixa" Foundation Seed Fund is a joint initiative with the MIT, whose objective is to promote knowledge and cutting-edge research to face great challenges of the 21st century. Two BSC projects have been selected out of a total of 30: "Computational Genomics through Flash and Accelerators" led by David Carrera and “Multi-Qubit Couplings in Superconducting Quantum Circuits”, led by Pol Forn-Díaz.

Mexico grants the Decoration of the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle to Mateo Valero

This award is the highest Mexican order awarded to foreigners in the country. BSC director will receive this award for his outstanding contribution to scientific development in Mexico, in particular to the area of HPC, for his brilliant academic and research career, recognized worldwide, and for having been a key player in the development of HPC in Mexico.

Leonidas Kosmidis wins Honourable Mention for the EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award 2018

The BSC researcher received an Honourable Mention for his outstanding PhD Dissertation titled ”Enabling Caches in Probabilistic Timing Analysis” at the Eurosys 2018 Conference held in Porto. The EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award is presented annually to the best PhD dissertation from a European Institution in the area of Systems.

Virtual Humans awarded is the Australian festival Scinema

The SCINEMA International Science Film Festival has awarded the documentary Virtual Humans for the Technical Merit as they consider that “this film is a technically stunning example of the power and versatility of supercomputers, helping us see our body in ways we never have before”. This short documentary is produced by BSC in the framework of CompBioMed H2020 Centre of Excellence.

Sixteen BSC technologies on Innovation Radar

Sixteen innovations developed at BSC within projects funded by the European Commission are published on the Innovation Radar initiative. The innovations, which have been identified by independent experts, span a wide range of areas including low-power computing, big data analytics, the Internet of Things and wind energy. This initiative aims to identify high-potential innovations and innovators in EC-funded projects, helping to maximise the outcomes of public money spent on research.