BSC-CNS Newsletter July 2019

EuroHPC has selected BSC as one of the institutions that will host a pre-exascale supercomputer in the high-capacity supercomputer network promoted by EC. MareNostrum 5 will incorporate an experimental platform aimed at developing new technologies for the future generation of supercomputers. Hence, BSC shows its commitment contributing with its research so that future generations of supercomputers will be able to incorporate technologies fully developed in Europe.

Acting President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, visited us after BSC was selected by the EuroHPC as entity to host one of the largest European supercomputers, to know closely the scope of the project. Sánchez visited the centre together with Acting Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities, Pedro Duque, Acting Government delegate in Catalonia, Teresa Cunillera and Acting Secretary General of Scientific Policy Coordination and president of the BSC consortium, Rafael Rodrigo.

“Saint George on a bike”, from BSC, has been chosen as one of the seven projects of the Telecom category that will get CEF (Connecting Europe Facility) funding, a European tool to facilitate international interaction between administrations, companies and citizens through the development of digital service infrastructures. The goal of “Saint George on a bike” is to endow AI of knowledge regarding European cultural patrimony.

EU-funded project S2S4E launched its new sub-seasonal and seasonal forecasts, Decision Support Tool (DST), which can enable better preparation for extreme weather events in a changing climate and could be useful for emergency planners and all weather-dependent industries. BSC coordinates this tool, whose main feature is to show both sub-seasonal and seasonal forecasts for precipitation, solar radiation, temperature and wind ranging from one week to three months ahead.

The frequency of marine heatwave days increased by 50% over the past century but our ability to predict them has been limited by a lack of understanding around the key global processes that cause and amplify these events. Now, an international team,  in which BSC researcher Markus Donat participated, has published in Nature Communications the first global assessment of the major drivers of marine heatwaves.

Combining massive computing power with big data analytics is radically transforming healthcare, helping accelerate scientific discovery and innovation. In the DeepHealth project, funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme, powerful computing resources will be harnessed for biomedical applications.

BSC has published the fifth public release (version 19.06) of the OmpSs-2 programming model.  In this release, the OmpSs-2 runtime has been enhanced with several bug fixes and performance improvements related to the TAMPI library. In this release we include a preview of the new OmpSs-2@cluster implementation, an extension to our OmpSs-2 model, which supports tasking capability across multiple nodes in cluster based systems. 

For the first time, the Master’s degree on Personalized Medicine and Health Applied Bioinformatics of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII) will be taught in Barcelona, organized BSC. This specialization is addressed to doctors, biologists or biotechnologists, among other professionals interested in the analysis and results’ interpretation of massive sequencing, as well as mathematicians, statisticians or engineers interested in the application of informatics to health related problems.

The Young Academy of Spain has been constituted with the aim of representing and giving visibility to young scientists, preferably from the field of experimental sciences. One of the founding members and vice president of this new scientific institution is the ICREA researcher Toni Gabaldón, who joined the last April with double affiliation to the BSC and IRB Barcelona.