BSC-CNS Newsletter January 2021

Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Newsletter
NEWSLETTER January 2021
News

BSC’s tool to visualize the relationship between the citizens’ mobility and the risk of Covid-19 spreading

The Covid-19 Flow-Maps platform can serve as support to the administrations, for decision making; to epidemiologists, to feed their models with updated data, and to citizens, to visualize the relationship of the pandemic, mobility and its associated risk.

AINA is born, the project that will guarantee the survival of the Catalan language in the digital age

The project is promoted by the Department of Digital Policies with the collaboration of BSC. The project will generate the digital and linguistic resources necessary to facilitate the development of voice assistants, automatic translators or conversational agents in Catalan.

"Deepmind has just shown that AI is invaluable in understanding how life works"

The director of BSC Life Sciences department, Alfonso Valencia, was part of the jury that verified the amazing results of DeepMind when it comes to predicting the structure of proteins. Valencia is the author of one of the most cited articles among students of protein structure, in which he begins to draw the method by which the relationship between the amino acid sequences of a protein and its structure and functions can be deciphered.

BSC and SUEZ to collaborate on a project to apply big data technologies to the integral water cycle

BSC and SUEZ in Spain signed a collaboration agreement, whereby the BSC will provide knowledge in computing technologies, high-performance algorithms, artificial intelligence, visualization and big data, and SUEZ will contribute its expertise in the operation of drinking water distribution networks for the testing, development, validation and application of new management tools.

FC Barcelona and BSC complete the first phase of the IoTwins project

The first phase of the IoTwins project has been completed. It is an innovative system that applies the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence to analyse and predict the movement of people inside and outside the facilities of the Club. Once developed, will allow improved management of mainly the mobility of the visitors and the offer of services.

CoEC targets breakthroughs in combustion through Exascale computing

BSC coordinates the recently launched Center of Excellence in Combustion (CoEC). The European Union is committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. CoEC addresses this challenge using advanced modelling and simulation technologies to study the combustion of sustainable fuels and new combustion technologies in order to transform Europe´s power and transportation sectors.

BSC researchers develop and validate hardware components of the De-RISC platform

The European project De-RISC works towards creating a market-ready platform based on RISC-V for the aerospace market. Researchers of BSC contributed to the first version of the De-RISC MPSoC platform and the Performance Monitoring Unit, integrating observability and controllability capabilities.

BSC researchers lead the European HPC resilience initiative

BSC researchers lead the European HPC resilience initiative, which aims to promote information exchange and collaboration across the diverse communities affected by resilience concerns. One of the first steps forward is the publication of the whitepaper titled Towards Resilient EU HPC Systems: A Blueprint, prepared in collaboration with European research centers, US national laboratories, HPC-related companies and various European HPC projects.

New versions for COMPSs, dislib and OmpSs-2

The COMPSs programming model 2.8 includes an extension to improve the programmability of user-defined reductions. The release of dislib 0.6.0 includes a new multivariate linear regression and a parallel implementation of the Singular Value Decomposition. In the OmpSs-2 version 2020.11 the default dependency system has changed from regions to discrete.

The spin-off of BSC Nearby Computing obtains an investment of €2 Milion

Cellnex Telecom, Lenovo and Elewit have led the investment round in the Nearby Computing start-up, an initiative of BSC and UPC, with an investment of approximately 2 million euros. The investment raised in this seed-round will serve to reinforce the growth of the company, by promoting the global commercialization of Edge and 5G products that make up Nearby Computing's value proposition.

BSC receives the Autelsi award for its contribution to promoting new technologies

The Spanish Association of Users of Telecommunications and the Information Society (Autelsi) awarded BSC for its “outstanding promotion of the Development of Telecommunications and Information Systems”. With this recognition, Autelsi wanted to underline the trajectory of the BSC not only as a research centre for computer architecture but also as an international centre of excellence for e-science.

Mervi Mantsinen, selected for the European Physical Society Plasma Physics Division Board

Mervi Mantsinen, ICREA Research professor and Fusion group manager at BSC, has been selected for the European Physical Society Plasma Physics Division Board and will start her tasks in the board in June 2021. For Mantsinen it is a honour and a recognition by many people to be selected for this position of trust, which involves taking part with an active and visible role in many top-level decisions in the field.

Mateo Valero wins the Outstanding Leadership in HPC award in HPCwire Readers' Choice Awards

Mateo Valero, the director of BSC, was recognized with the Outstanding Leadership in HPC award in the HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards, presented digitally during the virtual SC20. Valero was very grateful for the award and wanted to share it with the BSC staff.

Best paper Award at SC20 for the research in which BSC researcher Simón García de Gonzalo participates

​The paper “Petascale XCT: 3D Image Reconstruction with Hierarchical Communications on Multi-GPU Nodes” garnered the Best Paper Award at SC20. The research team is led by Argonne researcher Tekin Bicer and PhD candidate Mert Hidayetoglu at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and comprising the BSC researcher Simón García de Gonzalo.

Coming up
01 FEB 2021 PATC: Introduction to Big Data Analytics Location: Virtual
23 FEB 2021 PATC: Introduction to Heterogeneous Memory Usage Location: Virtual
24 FEB 2021 PATC Systems Workshop: Programming MareNostrum 4 Location: Virtual
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