BSC-CNS Newsletter July 2022

The procurement contract of MareNostrum 5 has been signed by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking and the company Atos, the selected vendor. MareNostrum 5 will be a top-of-the-range supercomputer, with a peak performance of 314 Pflops, or 314 million billion calculations per second, and more than 200 petabytes of storage and 400 petabytes of active archive.

The Spanish Government and Intel plan to invest up to €400 million over 10 years to setup a new joint laboratory. One of the main objectives will be to design chips with technology based on open-source RISC-V hardware, to be used in the future zettascale supercomputers. This collaboration will help Europe to become autonomous in these type of chips, which will be used worldwide in the design of autonomous cars or devices for artificial intelligence applications.

BSC and Lenovo have signed an agreement to advance research in multiple Spanish and EU priority sectors for high-performance computing. Through this collaboration, Lenovo will invest 7 million dollars over three years - the largest amount invested by the company in research within Spain- to advance precision medicine through the use of supercomputing; the design and development of open-source European chips; and the creation of more energy-sustainable supercomputers and data centres.

BSC coordinates QUSTom, a new European project that aims to introduce a new medical imaging modality based for the first time on ultrasound and supercomputing, which will complement or even replace current techniques that use X-rays such as mammograms. This technology will be completely safe for patients, as it does not use any type of radiation. It will also offer a superior image quality and better monitoring of tumours, among other advantages.

BSC coordinates HARMONIZE project, which aims to better understand the link between climate change and the increasing risk in the incidence of mosquito-borne diseases. HARMONIZE aims to develop cost-effective and reproducible digital infrastructure for stakeholders in climate change hotspots in Latin America & the Caribbean, including cities, small islands, highlands, and the Amazon rainforest.

IDAlert project aims to tackle the emergence and transmission of zoonotic pathogens by developing novel indicators, innovative early warning systems and efficient tools for decision-makers, and by evaluating adaptation and mitigation strategies to build a Europe more resilient to emerging health threats. BSC is part of the coordination team alongside Umeå University.

The Earth Sciences Department of BSC has been one of the climate prediction groups that have contributed to the new Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update, issued this week by the World Meteorological Organization. The study concludes that there is a 50:50 chance of the annual average global temperature temporarily reaching 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial level for at least one of the next five years – and the likelihood is increasing with time.

CAELESTIS project has been launched and seeks to develop a novel and secure end-to-end Interoperable Simulation Ecosystem (ISE) to usher in a cleaner period of European Aviation. BSC will lead the way in the design and development of a digital ecosystem to enable the flexible integration of product and process simulation tools and industry-driven product and process optimization services on demand at HPC.

The third release of the results of the European Space Agency Gaia mission presents the largest collection of astrophysical data on the Milky Way. For the first time, it includes data on low-resolution and radial velocity spectroscopy. BSC has contributed to Gaia since its beginning, providing 58 million hours  of supercomputing in the MareNostrum supercomputer and programming models. Specifically for this third release of data, Barcelona Supercomputing Center has contributed almost 33 million hours.

The policy of closing bars and restaurants was applied across Catalonia between October and November 2020 and it brought with it a noticeable reduction in the mobility of people, in fact, it translated into a statistically significant reduction in the growth of COVID-19 cases. This is the main conclusion of a recent BSC study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Top industry leaders and researchers met at BSC for a two-day European Memory Systems Forum (29-30 June) dedicated to identifying existing challenges for high-performance memory systems and considering solutions and ways forward. This forum of European expertise, organized in the framework of the Deep-Sea project, represented the first physical meeting of many of the key actors active in the discussion around memory systems.

This COMPSs release includes several new features such as transparent checkpointing support, automatic creation of data provenance information, and support for MPMD MPI applications. COMPSs is a task-based programming model known for notably improving the performance of large-scale applications by automatically parallelizing their execution.The Python binding comes with Mypy compilation and a new CLI to unify executions of application in different environments.

BSC in collaboration with FC Barcelona, held an Open Day to present IoTwins, a project funded by the European Commission that seeks to change the management model of high-traffic infrastructures. The event took place at BSC and then at the Camp Nou, and was attended by representatives of the Barcelona City Council and the Barcelona Provincial Council, technology and innovation centres, transport companies, sports industry, among others.

Volunteers from all over Europe analyze 5,000 paintings to train AI models that help better understand cultural and artistic heritage and make it more accessible to the public. This initiative has been launched in the framework of the Saint George on a Bike project, coordinated by in collaboration with the Europeana Foundation.

The Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth of the European Union, Mariya Gabriel, visited the facilities BSC, together with the Spanish Minister of Science and Innovation, Diana Morant and the president of the Catalan Government, Pere Aragonès. The European Commissioner highlighted the key role of this "strategic infrastructure" in driving innovation across Europe and in helping researchers find solutions to contemporary challenges.

The director of BSC, Mateo Valero, has officially entered the Royal European Academy of Doctors (RAED) as an Honorary Academician. José Ramón Calvo, president of the RAED's Institute for International Cooperation, said that Mateo is considered one of the 25 most influential researchers in Spain and highlighted “the pedagogical and didactic nature of the contributions” of Valero.

The Citizen Assembly for Climate has been recognized with the National Environment Award granted by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge "for having been a model of participation dedicated to deliberating, reflecting and proposing solutions to face one of the great global challenges”. One of the experts in this assembly is the BSC researcher Asun Lera , who has advised the government and the community of citizens

This edition, held from 10 to 12 of May, has been especially intense and rewarding, as it has been the first face-to-face Doctoral Symposium since 2019. There have been six talk sessions with 24 talks tackling the topics of simulations and modelling, performance, life sciences and machine learning and its applications. The keynote talk was in charge of Bastian Koller, the managing director of the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart.