BSC-CNS Newsletter May 2020

BSC collaborates in the fight against the coronavirus from different areas: the application of bioinformatics for the research on the virus and its possible treatments, the use of artificial intelligence and natural language processing and big data techniques to analyse the data about the spread and impact of the pandemic and the use of the MareNostrum 4 supercomputer to enable the fight against the coronavirus.

This repository, released through the journal Nature website, brings together and organizes the knowledge generated so far on the molecular map of viruses and the mechanisms of interaction between the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the host, guided by contributions from experts in the domain and based on published work.

The objective of DRAC is to manufacture a processor and several accelerators to be used in security tasks (encryption or protection from attacks against hardware, for example), personalized medicine (especially genomic analysis) and autonomous navigation (cars and other vehicles).

The European Research Council (ERC) announced the ERC Proof of Concept (PoC) recipients, among whom is the BSC researcher, Prof. Natasa Przulj. This PoC project aims to pave the road to commercialize a comprehensive data analytics platform enabling data-driven biomedical innovation and precision medicine.

The study on PluryZymes, a new enzyme model, was selected to be the cover of Nature Catalytics of March. This work was led by researchers from BSC in collaboration with the Instituto de Catálisis y Petroleoquímica -CSIC. They created a new model of enzymes, PluriZymes, a significant advance in enzyme engineering where additional artificial active sites are added into one enzyme.

Thanks to the public procurement of innovation for HPC by PPI4HPC (Public Procurement of Innovations for High Performance Computing), BSC will provide a new infrastructure, which allows for higher data storage and data analysis capacity. The proposed infrastructure includes a disk tier built on all-flash technology and spinning disk drives.

For the first time ever, BSC researchers from the CASE department have been awarded a coordinated Clean Sky project by the European Union. Titled “Emissions SooT ModEl” (ESTiMatE), it aims to create physical models and efficient algorithms for the prediction of soot in aero engine combustors by the generation of advanced software for simulation.

The European project SELENE proposes a new family of safety-critical computing platforms that builds upon open source components such as RISC-V cores, GNU/Linux, and Jailhouse hypervisor.

The MareNostrum Experimental Exascale Platform (MEEP) project supports the goal of the European Union (EU) program EuroHPC to create competitive European technology integrated into future exascale supercomputers.

This course is composed by video-tutorials, a brief theoretical introduction of concepts around Data Centers and Machine Learning, also examples and exercises using the data processing platforms Apache Spark and Intel BigDL.