BSC-CNS Newsletter January 2022

Traffic restrictions applied in Barcelona are insufficient to comply with EU air quality legislation

Researchers from BSC have quantified the impact of the different measures that are being carried out to reduce pollution caused by traffic in the city of Barcelona. The study shows that the measures adopted to date must be accompanied by a drastic decrease in traffic to comply with the air quality standards imposed by the EU. Without a significant reduction in traffic, the impact of measures such as superblocks or tactical urban planning has a rebound effect in neighboring areas.

Do lockdowns influence the development of the pandemic?

The Scientific Data journal published the article that presents the COVID-19 Flow-Maps initiative, an open geographic information system on COVID-19 and the mobility of citizens in Spain, which has been developed at BSC. It is an open geographic information system that integrates cross-referenced geolocated data on human mobility, at different resolution scales, and COVID-19 cases.

First massive Artificial Intelligence system in the Spanish language, MarIA, expands its capabilities to use the language

The MarIA project, the language model system created at BSC from the web files of the National Library of Spain and framed and financed with the Plan of Language Technologies of the SEDIA, has advanced in its development and its new version allows summarizing existing texts and creating new texts from headlines or words.

ChEESE´s volcanic ash forecasting service is validated in exercise conducted with the Buenos Aires Volcanic Ash Advisory Center

A real exercise was conducted to test a potential service on volcanic ash forecasts developed by the EU-funded project, ChEESE Center of Excellence. Results have shown that the ChEESE´s service, when compared to current setup of the Buenos Aires VAAC, produced faster and more accurate volcanic ash forecasts. This validates the project´s “Quantitative Volcanic Ash” service as a functional and reliable tool that is on the way to being operational in the next few years.

BSC releases PyCOMPSs/COMPSs version 2.10 and dislib version 0.7.0

This COMPSs release includes support for REST services, http requests tasks that will enable a new type of workflows that combine traditional tasks and http tasks. The Python binding comes with a new cache profiling feature that enables to decide which parameters have a higher reuse rate and get benefit from being stored in the workers' cache. And dislib includes a blocked QR decomposition with three modes, parallel random forest regressors, and a matrix multiplication with in-situ transposed arguments.

BSC releases OmpSs-2 version 2021.11

In this OmpSs-2 release, the taskloop support with the collapse clause has been extended. BSC researchers have also changed the default CPU manager policy from busy to hybrid, which reduces contention and energy consumption without degrading runtime performance. Moreover, the first release of the Task-Aware GASPI (TAGASPI) library (version 2021.11) has been launched.

Forecasts predicted 2021 Atlantic hurricane season would be one of the most active ever

The 2021 Atlantic hurricane season came to an end on November 30 as the third-most active year on record for named storms, trailing only 2020 and 2005. The season produced 21 named tropical or subtropical cyclones - the second season in a row in which the Atlantic named storm list that has 21 names was run out. Among those cyclones, seven became hurricanes, and four further intensified into major hurricanes.

Consular corps visits BSC

BSC Annual Meeting