The 2022 Innovation Radar picks up on BSC’s work on hyper reduced object models (HROM)

04 August 2022

Innovation Radar is the European Union's platform that publishes the most outstanding research initiatives financed with European funds

The European Commission’s Innovation Radar has identified the hyper reduced object models (HROM) technology that the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) helped to develop as having a high potential for innovation and the BSC as a high potential innovator. HROM was developed as part of the Edge Twins HPC Horizon 2020-funded project in conjunction with International Centre for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE) and Effectia Innovation Solutions.

HROM was assessed by the Innovation Radar as technology that addresses the needs of existing markets and falls under the Innovation Radar’s ‘exploring’ category. This category prizes organizations’ initiative to take steps to actively explore value creation opportunities, commercialization and the pursuit of concrete market-oriented ideas that advance technology development processes.

The EdgeTwins HPC project sought to extend digital twins to new market segments and users, including small and medium-sized enterprises, and to develop an open-source software tool (builder) to produce digital twins that run on the Edge. This approach yielded a project that evaluated the business feasibility of an open-source DigitalTwin building software for Edge applications and developed and tested a demonstrator use case.

The high-performance computing software that stemmed from the project was leveraged to allow for the use of HROM techniques that modelled complex 4D simulations and then extracted the essential features to allow for similar results to be obtained at a vastly reduced computational cost.

The BSC contributed to providing the underlying parallel technology needed to develop HROM through the PyCOMPSs programming model. PyCOMPSs (compss.bsc.es) is a programming environment that facilitates the parallelization of applications and their execution in distributed computing environments such as those of large supercomputers.

Rosa M Badia (picture), the main BSC researcher contributing to the project, says: “the programming and execution capabilities of PyCOMPSs are the principal enablers of these type of technologies. They provide simple and high-level interfaces that leverage the capacities of supercomputers.”

Innovation Radar

The Innovation Radar is a European Commission initiative that identifies high potential innovations and innovators in EU-funded research and innovation projects. It bases its selection on information and data gathered by independent experts who review research and innovation projects funded by the European Commission.

The goal of the Innovation Radar platform is to show citizens the scientific and technological advances that take place thanks to the Commission’s funding. By providing greater access to such information, the platform hopes to encourage the development of a dynamic ecosystem of incubators, entrepreneurs, funding agencies and investors that can help get EU-funded innovations to the market faster.