New Arm-BSC Centre of Excellence for continued innovation

17 May 2019

The Centre of Excellence will broaden the current scope of interaction and collaboration between BSC and Arm, from HPC to automotive, from scientific computing to real-time systems.

Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and Arm Research have signed a multi-year agreement to establish the Arm-BSC Centre of Excellence. This is in recognition of the leadership and hard work of BSC in pioneering Arm in High Performance Computing (HPC), and the success of EU-funded Mont-Blanc projects, of which both institutions are a main partner, alongside Atos Bull.

The Centre of Excellence will broaden the current scope of interaction and collaboration between BSC and Arm, from HPC to automotive, from scientific computing to real-time systems, and much more. BSC and Arm will continue to innovate in computer architecture, runtime systems, programming models for performance portability, and many other areas.

“For almost a decade, BSC has been one of our most active and successful research partners across a wide range of research topics. As well as recognizing the extremely high standard of work delivered by BSC researchers, the establishment of this Centre of Excellence will enable us to continue our close collaboration in order to advance the presence of Arm technologies in High Performance Computing and High Performance Data Analytics in Europe and worldwide”, states John Goodenough, Vice President Research Collaboration and Enablement, Arm.

Arm awards Centre of Excellence status to a small number of research institutions with whom to build long-term strategic partnerships, including collaborative research projects, co-authored publications and joint PhD studentships. The Arm-BSC Centre of Excellence has been established with these long term aims in mind, both in terms of the research that will be conducted within the centre as well as enabling research more widely. Together, BSC and Arm will continue to promote dissemination and outreach activities in Europe using Arm technologies, and Arm will support BSC’s participation in the Student Cluster Competition, the most relevant HPC contest for undergraduate students.

"BSC was the pioneer centre in proposing the use of ARM processors in supercomputing, with the Mont-Blanc project as the most outstanding" states Mateo Valero, BSC Director. "We feel honored to become an Arm Centre of Excellence and for sure this will strengthen even more our well settled collaboration with Arm".

The Arm-BSC Centre of Excellence is already active and operational. A first Arm SVE hackathon was organised together with the Mont-Blanc project at the beginning of January, and attracted a large number of local participants. With the support of PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, a further event is scheduled to take place by the end of the year.

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Our dedicated Research Collaboration and Enablement team works closely with institutions around the world to enable and accelerate research innovation by providing access to industry-standard IP, tools, design flows, and expertise.