BSC-CNS Newsletter September 2020

The European Commission (EC) has announced the set-up of new Centres of Excellence for High Performance Computer applications and BSC leads two, with a total budget of 10 million euros, and participates in a third one. This consolidates the presence of BSC in the HPC application centres of excellence promoted by the EC, since, out of a total of 13 centres, BSC coordinates four and participates in seven more.

Five institutions involved in the project provide five different data exploration and visualization tools that allow researchers to peer into this complex dataset. BSC has played a leading role in introducing researchers to collection of tools to explore PCAWG data and has created one of this tools, PCAWG-Scout, which allows users to run their own analyses on-demand. Nature Communications published the research.

The objective of this study is to explore the relation between the movement restriction policies taken by the government (during the period between March 1 and June 27), the mobility of people and the evolution of the pandemic. The work demonstrates how the correct use of these data can provide a detailed interpretation of mobility, for epidemiological and socio-economic analysis.

The Catalan Minister of Business and Knowledge, Àngels Chacón, visited the MareNostrum supercomputer and explained to the centre's directors the 2020-2029 agreement to guarantee the financing of BSC. This agreement provides for an investment of 59M€ from the Generalitat. The agreement is subscribed by the other partners of BSC, the Spanih Goverment and UPC, and has yet to be ratified.

The Minister of Industry, Trade and Tourism, Reyes Maroto, visited the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to know about the research being carried out. During the visit the centre's directors informed her of the most outstanding projects, including the future installation of the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, the European chip project, the BSC spin-offs and the collaboration with companies.

Published in Nature, the study suggests that the decadal variations in North Atlantic atmospheric pressure patterns are highly predictable, enabling advance warning whether winters in the coming decade are likely to be stormy, warm and wet, or calm, cold and dry. These long-term predictions (made with global climate models that need supercomputing resources) are possible if a large number of data providers work together.

BSC, under the Intel-BSC Exascale Lab and in collaboration with the EPEEC project, is heading the development of new software tools and expanding the software ecosystem for 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Optane persistent memory. This work is helping accelerate HPC applications using heterogeneous memory architectures. Antonio Peña is in charge of this research to explore how to accelerate large HPC workloads by leveraging heterogeneous memory systems.

More than 150 experts in artificial intelligence and natural language processing are taking part in an international competition, organized to create automatic tools capable of tracing and classifying wherever cancer tumours are mentioned in huge volumes of clinical texts written in Spanish language. The contest has been organized by BSC, within the frame of the Plan for the Boosting of Language Technologies (Plan TL) of the Spanish Secretariat for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence.

BSC participates in the EU-funded Rising STARS, a project that combines high-end research with global collaborations and networking. The project is funded under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie RISE program and is coordinated by the Observatoire de Paris.

Qbeast is a Big Data cloud platform and takes a “Cubistic approach” on Big Data. Thanks to an innovative data storage technology, that combines multidimensional indexing and sampling techniques, Qbeast organizes and manages data matching the way our brains consume it. The platform produces the same insights while only accessing a small fraction of available data. This is what Qbeast calls Data Leverage.

Nextmol (Bytelab Solutions SL) develops tools for atomistic simulation and data analysis to accelerate the design of new chemicals. Using these tools, Nextmol characterizes the behavior of chemical molecules, predicts their performance and identifies the best candidate molecules to meet certain physicochemical properties, by means of the computer and without the need to synthesize the molecule.

The objective of this spin-off is to offer a complete service and democratize this technology, since the new computer, a quantum variational device, will be accessible from a cloud service. This will allow companies and users to explore the possibility of applying quantum algorithms to real-life problems. Qilimanjaro develops the software needed to exploit the potential of quantum computing using tools such as the MareNostrum supercomputer.

Martina Klose, researcher in the Earth Sciences department, has been selected for a Helmholtz Young Investigator Group funded by the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers. In total, Klose will be funded for six years with € 1.8 million to create her own independent research group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) – Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research.