BSC-CNS Newsletter May 2017

European commitment to acquire and deploy Exascale supercomputers

Seven European countries have announced a joint initiative to acquire and deploy world-class high-performance computers, a project the European Commission says is comparable to the size of Airbus or the Galileo satellite navigation project. BSC and the Spanish National Supercomputing Network will have a key role in this agreement.

Close to 600 Data experts gather in Barcelona’s RDA Plenary

The 9th RDA Plenary Meeting brought together 600 data scientists, researchers, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, policymakers and data stewards from disciplines across the globe to explore how best to exploit the data revolution to improve science and society through data-driven discovery and innovation.

Mateo Valero named recipient of Charles Babbage Award

The BSC Director Mateo Valero has been selected to receive the 2017 IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) Charles Babbage Award. The new award recognizes “contributions to parallel computation through brilliant technical work, mentoring PhD students, and building an incredibly productive European research environment.”

Alfonso Valencia reviews the state-of-the-art of Information Retrieval and Text Mining Technologies for Chemistry

A Review authored by the BSC Life Sciences Department, Alfonso Valencia, provides a comprehensive and in-depth description of the stat-of-the-art of Information Retrieval and Text Mining Technologies for Chemistry.

AstraZeneca accelerates drug discovery thanks to PELE technology

AstraZeneca in collaboration with Heptares Therapeutic, has made significant progress with the new target called PAR2, using the PELE simulation software, as reported in Nature. PAR2 has applications for the generation of new drugs in the inflammatory pain field. PELE is a technology developed at BSC.

BSC and NVIDIA a step forward to the interactive simulation of humans

An in-situ visualization of the cardiac model implemented with ALYA code and NVIDIA IndeX scalable software solution demonstrates the power of HPC simulations in GPU-accelerated clusters. The demonstration has been shown with a real-time high-quality rendering at NVIDIA GTC17 Conference.

BSC to participate at IPCC Sixth Assessment Report on Climate Change

Francisco J. Doblas, the director of the Earth Sciences Department, was selected to take part in the Scoping Meeting of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. The event brought together 200 experts from 60 countries. The participation of Doblas evidences the increasingly prominent role of BSC in international climate research fora.

New line of research on the forecasts of forest fires based on seasonal forecasts.

The Department of Earth Sciences has opened a new line of research dedicated to forest fires. The objective is to develop models that help to perform forecasts of fires, based on seasonal forecasts of rain and fall precipitation during the last seasons. This new line of research will be carried out within the Climate Predictions group.

BSC joins the Alliance for Ibero-American Mobility

The Alliance for Ibero-American Mobility is an association to promote the international mobility of students, teachers and researchers. The alliance is part of the Ibero-American Framework for Academic Mobility, which aims to encourage teaching, research and academic stages in other countries of the Ibero-American Community, building a common knowledge space.

BSC to participate in the BIYSC initiative

BSC is taking part in the BIYSC (Barcelona International Youth Science Challenge) initiative with the project called “Computational study of coffee compounds for cancer prevention”, led by the centre’s Life Sciences department. The BIYSC is a two-week international excellence programme that aims to stimulate scientific talent among young students from all over the world.