BSC-CNS Newsletter January 2019

European leaders in Artificial Intelligence meet in Barcelona to promote the use of this technology in the EU

79 European Union entities, including 60 leading research centers, meet in Barcelona this week to kick off the European project AI4EU, in which BSC participates. The objective is to provide users with Artificial Intelligence resources that favor scientific research and technological innovation.

Record number of visitors to MareNostrum in 2018

2018 closed with an absolute record number of both visits and visitors to the MareNostrum supercomputer surpassing 14,100 people. There have been more than 1,240 guided visits: 373 visits from high schools, 328 from individual people, 77 from universities, 68 from companies, 57 from associations, 27 in the framework of congresses, and 22 from public institutions such as the Generalitat and the City Council of Barcelona, among other groups.

National Award for the Joint Center Repsol - BSC Research Centre

The Catalan government and the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation (FCRi) have granted the joint center Repsol – BSC Research Center the National Award for public-private partnership in R+D. This recognition intends to highlight the long career between both institutions in the field of research on seismic images technology.

BSC director calls for a coordinated effort to achieve a European Exascale supercomputer

Mateo Valero put particular emphasis on developing European processors and accelerators durint his speech in a plenary session at the ICT 2018 conference taking place from 4 -6 December in Vienna. “Europe is going in the right direction with EuroHPC and this must be sustained in the long-term. BSC fully supports this initiative and will do everything we can to help make it a success,” said Valero.

BSC, in charge of the quality control of the Climate Data Store of Copernicus Climate Change Service

BSC, leading a consortium of eight entities, is responsible for the evaluation of the quality and the provision of quality assurance information to users of the Climate Data Store, including its technical infrastructure, full data catalogue, and toolbox.

BSC will lead the development of a programming environment for the Exascale era

BSC is the coordinator of the EPEEC project, which aims to develop and deploy an integrated ecosystem of programming environment components that will enable highly productive Exascale programming. This will turn future Exascale supercomputers, which will be overwhelmingly heterogeneous, into manageable platforms for application developers in different domains

BSC to provide services to EOSC portal

The EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) portal provides access to data, services and resources and it is a source of up-to-date information about the EOSC initiative. This portal is developed by the EOSC-hub, eInfraCentral, EOSCpilot and OpenAIRE-Advance projects funded by the Horizon 2020 program. BSC takes part in EOSC-hub, leading the user support task within the project, and provides services to the EUDAT infrastructure, accessible through the EOSC Portal.

David Carrera awarded a medal in the Agustín de Betancourt prize

The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAI) has awarded BSC researcher David Carrera a medal in the “Agustín de Betancourt” prize for young researchers. RAI’s Awards Commission has valued and highlighted Carrera’s contributions to Computer Engineering in the area of infrastructure management and optimization for data-centric workloads, and its extensive collaboration with companies of worldwide reference in the field of Information Technology.

BSC opens applications for 8 predoctoral INPhINIT- “la Caixa” fellowships

BSC offers 8 predoctoral positions in this 3rd edition of the Doctoral Fellowship programme INPhINIT “la Caixa”. The selected candidates will have the opportunity of joining BSC’s research groups to carry out one of the research projects. If you’re interested in any of these projects, please contact the person supervising the project.

UPC participation completes the creation of Nearby Computing

The entry of the UPC in Nearby Computing SL culminates the shareholding of this technological spin-off dedicated to the development of the Internet of Things (IoT). The participation of the UPC in the shareholding further strengthens the collaboration between the research carried out by first-rate public institutions and the capital from private companies.

BSC releases COMPSs version 2.4

This release includes a new Autoparallel module that enables the automatic taskification of affine loop nests. This feature enables to parallelize the loops with a single Python decorator and frees the user from manually taskifying the original code. The support for the Jupyter notebook has been extended to enable the applications' execution in supercomputers. And version 2.4 comes also with a new Spark-like syntax based on the Distributed Data Set (DDS) data-structure.