BSC-CNS Newsletter July 2018

The new BSC machine is Europe’s “greenest” supercomputer

The brand-new BSC’s POWER9 cluster has emerged as the most "green" machine in Europe. In the Green500 ranking, MareNostrum 4 POWER9 cluster, which is a block mainly aimed at Artificial Intelligence, has revealed itself capable of executing 11.865 x 109 floating point operations per watt of consumed energy (11,865 Gigaflops / Watt).

MareNostrum 4 POWER9 racks begin operation

MareNostrum 4 supercomputer has incorporated into production three racks of last IBM POWER technologies with a peak performance of 1.5 petaflops. With this incorporation, BSC aims to explore the high expectative of this technology to accelerate Artificial Intelligence–based research. BSC becomes the first supercomputing center in Europe to offer access to the same technologies of the brand new Summit.

BSC collaborates in a study on Alzheimer's

A team from the Pasqual Maragall Foundation research center has detected alterations in the microstructure of the cerebral white substance of cognitively healthy middle-aged people and carriers of two copies of the gene that confers the greatest genetic risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, APOE-Ɛ4. BSC compiled and installed the software and libraries required for executing the experiments.

HPC to decipher how leukaemia's genome works

A team of researchers from IDIBAPS show for the first time the complete epigenome of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, the most common type of leukaemia. The study, published in Nature Medicine, provides a high-resolution map of the functions of the genome, which steps forward into cancer molecular research. With the collaboration of BSC, researchers could access the necessary high precision calculations to carry out this complex analysis.

BSC awarded ESA project to evaluate low-power GPUs for space applications

BSC has been awarded a European Space Agency project to evaluate the suitability of different processing devices for space applications. Named GPU4Space (GPU4S), it addresses the ESA call for “Low Power GPU solutions for high performance on-board data processing”. The project will explore the suitability of embedded graphics processing units (GPUs) for space computing.

Predicting Arctic sea ice retreat to anticipate future climate changes

F. Massonnet, one of the authors: "Our study suggests that the development of observing systems cannot be undertaken independently from the development of climate models, and vice-versa. While the two communities have been historically distant, they are getting closer for their mutual benefits and that of climate research".

2015 wind drought over USA attributed to high ocean temperatures in a remote region of the Pacific

Using retrospective climate predictions, BSC researchers find that high ocean temperatures in the western tropical Pacific Ocean played a central role to establish and maintain those wind anomalies. This is not a single event. The study shows that the wind speed variability in USA is not only dominated by El Niño but also by the ocean temperatures in this region of the Pacific. MareNostrum has been key in this research.

BSC participates in a project to reduce emissions at the Port of Barcelona

The RePort project, which has modified 26 trucks to boost the use of natural gas as an alternative fuel, has managed to reduce emissions of polluting gases by 20% and 20% of total fuel consumption, according to the preliminary results of the pilot tests of the project. BSC coordinates the emission and air quality modelling work package of the project.

Helping to ensure the future of the Mediterranean diet

BSC is participating in the MED-GOLD project, which is dedicated to optimising the management and planning of grape, olive and durum wheat production.The project will foster the creation of highly specialized climate services for each of these crops, providing indicators to optimise agricultural management practices in relation to the impact of global warming.

BSC joins the research area of sustainable agriculture and forestry with the LANDSUPPORT project

The LANDSUPPORT project envisages an open and freely accessible decision support system that enables the evaluation of trade-offs between land uses to support the development of sustainable agriculture, forestry and environmental policies and practices.

MareNostrum provides 470 million core hours to European scientists

In the 16th PRACE Call for Project Access, Spain has allocated 470 million core hours on MareNostrum to 17 projects led by scientists from different European countries. With this allocation, this is the second time in a row that this supercomputer has been the largest contributor in number of core hours in the last two PRACE Call for Proposals.

BSC researcher Alba Cervera, winner of the Teach Me QISKit priz

IBM selected Alba as the winner because her tutorial, “Exact Ising Model simulation: How to simulate time evolution at zero time” stood out among other high-quality submissions in creativity, originality, visual appearance and structure. Most importantly, Alba’s contribution nicely balances scientific details and structural content on a topic that is highly relevant for quantum applications such as quantum chemistry.

Young IT Researcher Award presented to Damián Roca

BSC researcher Damián Roca has won the Young IT Researcher Award 2018, presented by the Spanish Computer Science Society (SCIE) and BBVA Foundation. The award recognises his cutting-edge research in the field of the Internet of Things and autonomous vehicles applying Hierarchical Emergent Behaviors (HEB), which combines emerging behaviours with hierarchies to solve complexity and scalability problems.

Mateo Valero receives the Order of the Aztec Eagle

Numerous Catalan and Spanish policy makers, along with leading scientists, came together for a ceremony during which BSC Director was presented the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle. The honour was awarded to Valero in recognition of: his outstanding contribution to Mexican science, particularly in the area of HPC; his brilliant academic and research career, recognised across the globe; and for playing a key role in the development of high-performance computing in Mexico

CIONET Award to BSC Operations Director

Sergi Girona has received the CIONET Award for digital leadership in the public sector for the digital achievements reached last year. The jury has taken into account two major milestones to grant this award: on the one hand, the MareNostrum 4 supercomputer, which was installed in record time (two months). On the other hand, its power consumption has not undergone a proportional growth to its power. During his speech, Girona said that this award recognizes the effort and the teamwork.

Fabrizio Gagliardi recognized with the 2018 ACM Presidential Award

The BSC senior strategy advisor, receives the ACM Presidential Award in recognition of his selfless dedication to ACM, ensuring the organization’s activities, services, and influence extend throughout the European continent. He is honoured for his tireless efforts as the spirit behind ACM’s public policy arm in Europe having served as its Chair since 2013.

BSC releases COMPSs version 2.3

This release includes support for Python 3 and for Python virtual environments, a persistent worker with memory-to-memory transfers for the C binding, and a default implementation of the persistent storage API based on Redis DB. Also, the worker side of the runtime has been extended to implement a memory-to-memory transfer mechanism for C applications that reduces the overhead of the tasks’ execution.

New release of OmpSs-2 programming model

OmpSs-2 extends the tasking model of OmpSs/OpenMP to support both task nesting and fine-grained dependencies across different nesting levels. This enables the effective parallelization of applications using a top-down methodology. In this release, the OmpSs-2 tasking model has been enhanced to better support hybrid (MPI+OmpSs-2) and heterogeneous (OmpSs-2+CUDA C kernels) programming.