On 1 April, BSC is organising an event which will be attended by policy makers, as well as well-known international figures from academia and industry.
BSC was created on April 1 2005, catapulting Spain into the elite of international supercomputing, the result of an already long existing collaboration between the UPC, the Spanish Ministry and the Generalitat. This had begun with the creation of CEPBA in, European Center of Parallelism of Barcelona, in 1991, and continued with the CEPBA-IBM Research Institute founded in 2000.
In our ten years of existence BSC has achieved much more than could reasonably been expected back then. We have enabled more than 3,000 scientific projects to be run on the MareNostrum; we have driven the design of cutting-edge hardware and software technologies; we have helped to create the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES) and the pan-European distributed supercomputing infrastructure, PRACE; we have won funding for more than 90 EU projects; we have created long-term joint research centres with some of the best IT companies in the world (IBM, Microsoft, Intel and NVIDIA); we have helped Repsol to become a global leader in its industry; we have worked with Iberdrola to create greener energy; we have achieved the Severo Ochoa recognition; we have helped to create the ETP and the Public Private Partnership for HPC; we have published hundreds of papers; we have supervised 140 PhD thesis; we have closely collaborated internationally especially with Latin America and particularly through the creation of RISC, the Ibero-American Supercomputing Network; and we have grown to become an internationally respected centre with more than 420 people.
During the past ten years almost 300 people have passed through the BSC and have used the centre as a springboard from which to launch themselves into other excellent organisations. With the launch of the BSC Folks platform, we want to make sure that we keep in touch with these people and continue the mutually beneficial relationship with them. In the past five years, during a time of grave economic crisis, BSC has created 150 jobs and our ambition is to further strengthen our role as a generator of wealth and wellbeing.
We realise that our achievements have only been possible though the bright ideas, rigour, hard work and dedication of a huge number of people. We also realise that not everything is perfect, and that as directors, we need to continuously improve. We can do that using input from different sources including the “comité de empresa”, the scientific advisory board, and through contact and conversation with all of you, and we believe that the implementation of the HRS4R action plan will be an important step in this direction.
The 10th anniversary event on April 1 will be an opportunity to celebrate our achievements, and to look forward to the challenge of continuing to position BSC as an essential facilitator and practitioner of excellent data intensive science and innovation. Above all, it will be a chance to get together and to enjoy ourselves.
The quote “the future is not what it used to be” now seems truer than ever, and the pace of technological and social change is often so fast that we feel overwhelmed. BSC’s task over the next ten years will be to provide science and society with the necessary tools to cope with this uncertain future. Judging from the results of the past ten years, we have every confidence that we will continue to be an example of how collaboration between scientists, public institutions and companies can produce both excellent science and a positive economic impact.
Mateo Valero, BSC Director and Francesc Subirada, BSC Associate Director