BSC-CNS Newsletter July 2021

Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Newsletter
NEWSLETTER July 2021
News

EUROfusion entrusts BSC with the creation of an Advanced Computing Hub to accelerate the development of fusion energy

The consortium EUROfusion has entrusted BSC to create and manage one of the five Advanced Computing Hubs that will support experimental scientists working in the development of this new source of electricity generation. Five Advanced Computing Hubs across Europe will help experimental scientists accelerate the arrival of fusion energy, to become a reality by the middle of this century. 

Climate change can bring more rainfall to Europe

Rainfall in Europe during the winter season could increase by around 20% in the next 30 years if greenhouse gases continue to be emitted at the current level. This is the conclusion of a new study, published in Environmental Research Letters, led by BSC’s researchers together with researchers from the Met Offic. The research, based on new high-resolution climate models with a higher degree of realism than traditional ones, could change the current understanding of how climate can change over Europe and the North Atlantic.

Improved air quality during first wave of COVID-19 prevented around 150 premature deaths in major Spanish cities

Air quality in Spain temporarily improved during the first wave of COVID-19, largely as a result of mobility restrictions. Until recently, however, the effect of this improvement on the health of the population was poorly understood. A new study led by the ISGlobal together with BSC has estimated that this improvement in air quality prevented around 150 premature deaths in Spain’s provincial capital cities.

BSC researchers to apply supercomputing techniques to reduce blockchain energy consumption

BSC collaborates with the Ethereum foundation and the European project Ontochain to launch, in 2022, a new blockchain system. The new system will expand the scalability of this technology by increasing the number of transactions per second more than 1,000 times and reduce its energy consumption up to 500 times. Kumo crawler, created by Leonardo Bautista and his team, monitors the blockchain network to measure the reliability of the new 2.0 protocol.

BSC, Codeplay and SiFive help accelerate applications on RISC-V thanks to V-extension support in LLVM

BSC has been collaborating with Codeplay Software and SiFive to implement support for the RISC-V V-extension v0.10 in the LLVM compilation infrastructure. Thanks to this support, users of RISC-V will be able to take advantage of vector computation capabilities of the RISC-V V-extension through C/C++ intrinsics. 

BSC to participate in two projects for environment-friendly textiles, cosmetics and detergents

FuturEnzyms and Oxipro projects aim to promote the development of enzymes for the manufacture of greener daily consumer products. Both activities have a total funding of almost 12 million euros and will be carried out with leading academic and industrial partners. BSC has a key role in the bioprospecting and engineering of enzymes, through the development and application of new computational tools.

BSC captures the local patterns of human mobility in Barcelona with the collaboration of the Barcelona City Council and Vodafone

The 15-minute city projects aim to give population access to essential urban services within a 15-minute walk or bike in order to increase mobility within residential areas. Researchers from BSC have published a study on PLOS ONE which aims to improve the understanding of the relationship between human mobility and urban amenities in the context of polycentric and 15-minute city planning strategies. 

BSC releases COMPSs version 2.9

This COMPSs release includes support for nested tasks, including recursive nested tasks. This feature enhances the programmability of applications that naturally have a hierarchical structure. It also helps on mapping large tasks into nodes and smaller tasks in resources inside the nodes, which enables a better locality exploitation. The Python binding comes with a new Python workers cache, which overcomes one of the largest overheads for Python applications, which had to serialize the tasks' parameters into files.

BSC releases OmpSs-2 version 2021.06

The Programming Models group at BSC has published a new release (version 2021.06) of the OmpSs-2 programming model. We have extended the OmpSs-2 programming model and runtime system to support NUMA systems. We have also enhanced the taskloop construct to support data dependencies, and the CTF tracing systems now support MPI applications. In addition, the CPU manager has a new hybrid policy. Finally, this release also includes several performance enhancements and bug fixes.

BSC researcher Rosa M. Badia receives the HPDC Achievement Award 2021

Rosa M. Badia, the BSC Workflows and distributed computing group manager and coordinator of the eFlows4HPC project, has received the HPDC Achievement Award 2021 for her innovations in parallel task-based programming models, workflow applications and systems, and leadership in the high performance computing research community. She is the first researcher to carry out her work in Europe recognized by this award.

BSC researcher Jordi Torres publishes the first book in Spanish on deep reinforcement learning

The Emerging technologies for artificial intelligence group leader, Jordi Torres, has published the book "Introduction to deep reinforcement learning. Theory and practice in Python". The manual is intended to be an initiation guide for those who want to know the theoretical foundations of the area. It is the first book in Spanish on this area.

BSC renews the Human Resources Excellence in Research Award

BSC has renewed the HR Excellence in Research Award with which the European Commission recognises the BSC commitment to the principles of the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers. BSC makes this commitment effective through its HR Strategy for Researchers aimed to provide the best framework and environment for research excellence.

Coming up
05 JUL 2021 PUMPS + AI Summer School 2021 Location: Virtual
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