The MareNostrum will participate in the hackathon #BitsxlaMarató, to collaborate with the Marató of TV3

12 November 2019

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), the Faculty of Computer Science of Barcelona (FIB), the Campus Docent de Sant Joan de Déu, the Hackers@UPC, the Institut d'Investigació de Sant Joan de Déu, the Centre de Recerca en Enginyeria Biomèdica (CREB) and the European project Share4Rare organize a three-day hackathon to collaborate with knowledge and donations in the Marató de TV3, which this year is dedicated to minority diseases.

The hackathon is called #BitsxlaMarató and will take place from December 13 to 15 on the UPC Campus and in addition to collaborating in the Maraton, it aims to highlight what information technology can contribute to the study of minority diseases.

The MareNostrum supercomputer will participate in the Maraton, providing biological data on the minor disease of DENT, and being available to participants to find efficient ways to extract information about these data. These will be generated and analyzed with the MareNostrum 4 emerging technology cluster, POWER 9.

On the first day, the organizers will present to the participants, experts in informatics and bioinformatics, a series of challenges. During the next two days, the participants, organized in teams, will try to make their contributions to respond to these challenges.

The challenge in which MareNostrum will be involved is to compare the functioning of a healthy CNCL5 protein and a CNCL5 protein affected by Dent's disease. So far, researchers take it for granted that the malfunction of this protein is the cause of the disease, but it is not yet known at what precise point of its operation the problem is and, therefore, it is not yet known how to attack it. Several researchers from BSC and its spin-off NostrumBiodiscovery are working selflessly on this challenge.

See poster here.

Further information here.