BSC to participate for the first time in the “Crazy about science” programme with year-long course on supercomputing

Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC) will take part in the next edition of “Crazy about science” programme, which is organized by the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera since 2013 to encourage scientific vocations among young people and to promote educational excellence in Catalunya.

With “Crazy about supercomputing”, BSC will offer a complete programme that aims at showing the multidisciplinary research undertaken at the MareNostrum supercomputer. The course is directed toward first-year “bachillerato” students (equivalent to UK A Level) with a special interest in the areas related to the supercomputing and new technologies.

This multidisciplinarity will be shown in the diversity of the profiles of the BSC researchers, who are specialised in mathematics, computer sciences, physics, chemistry or biology, among others.

The programme will begin on 19 January 2019 with a module providing an introduction to supercomputing, in which students will visit MareNostrum 4 to find out more about high-performance computing and what a supercomputer is used for. In this module they will also build a supercomputer and learn the main concepts of parallel programming. This will be followed by a module showing how mathematics is used for supercomputing, while the module on simulations will show them programs that recreate the real world using supercomputers, in order to understand it better.

In the unit on artificial intelligence (AI), BSC researchers will explain what AI is used for and which direction it will take, using games to promote understanding of neural networks. In the following module, which deals with climate change, students will have to put themselves in the position of climatologists and build models to forecast the climate of the future. The module on quantum computing will teach students basic concepts of this area, while in the computational biology module they will be taught genomics, drug design, the application of social networks in the field of biology and medical text mining. The final module, which will be taking place from 9-16 November, will address issues connected with smart cities.

BSC’s participation in this initiative is framed within the new BSC’s scientific outreach plan to raise awareness among young people of the importance of supercomputing in different research areas, and also to emphasize the multidisciplinary aspect of science and technology as key tools for the progress of knowledge.

The course is designed for first-year “bachillerato” students, who can apply for the course through their education provider. Those who pass the first stage of selection will need to attend a face-to-face interview. A máximum of 25 students will then be chosen for each course.