BSC-CNS Newsletter January 2023

For the first time, gene expression has been studied in 46 tissues and organs of hundreds of people with different traits, such as age, sex, genetic ancestry or weight. The research provides fundamental information on how the activation of these genes changes with age, between men and women or between individuals of different geographical origins, allowing a significant advance towards personalized medicine.

BSC is coordinating the EOSC4Cancer project, a European digital ecosystem of shared data to accelerate cancer research. The initiative, funded with nearly €8M by the EU, will enable federated and secure access to various types of cancer data across European borders, in order to process and reuse information from cancer research across the EU. EOSC4Cancer brings together a consortium of 29 scientific institutions from 13 countries.

HealthyCloud presented its Strategic Agenda for the future of the European Health and Research Innovation Cloud (HRIC) and envisioned how this new European HRIC could work to ensure the first integration between the European Health Data Space and the European Open Science and thus connect the data used by different scientific communities at the European level. BSC co-cordinates this project alongside Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud.

Within the context of the European-funded SELENE project, BSC researchers have developed four safety-related components that improve observability and control channels to provide flexible solutions and by assessing them in industrial use cases. BSC has developed development the open-source modules SafeSU, SafeDE, SafeDM, SafeTI that support verification and validation processes and safety measure deployment to guarantee that the project’s safety goals are met.

Coordinated by ATOS Spain, the European project called “Towards a functional continuum operating system” (ICOS) will run for the next three years. Researchers from BSC will be involved in the development of a single platform to facilitate the management of data and distributed execution across the compute continuum that will be able to run seamlessly on heterogeneous and possibly small devices.

An international research team, in which the BSC researcher Paolo De Luca has participated, has successfully developed a state-of-the-art framework to study the climate variability of the atmospheres of exoplanets. This kind of study might provide a better understanding of the climate changes that Earth is currently experiencing and how its atmosphere might change in the future. The investigation of the climate variability of Earth-like exoplanets is key in the search of planets outside our solar system where life could emerge.

AIRA's mission is to strengthen the competitiveness of the Catalan AI research ecosystem by boosting the knowledge industry and projecting Catalonia as a pole of reference, leader in southern Europe, in research in this field. Its main objectives are to bring together all the leading research capacity of the Catalan ecosystem, promote high-impact research, attract and retain talent and promote specialization in the field of AI.

This COMPSs release includes several new features such as a new decorator and corresponding runtime extensions to support automatic data transformations before tasks' execution. The Python binding comes with a new Julia decorator to support the integration of Julia in PyCOMPSs workflows. dislib new release includes GPU support for some methods, new parallel methods (TSQR, KNN), and a generalization of the grid search for any type of simulations.

In this release, we have defined a generic interface between the LLVM compiler and Nanos6 runtime to support kernels targeting hardware accelerators. This release also contains several bug fixes and performance improvements that improve lock contention and reduce task creation overheads. Finally, we have added support for Ovni, a new instrumentation module that will become the default in the next release.

BSC offers 8 predoctoral positions in this edition of the Doctoral Fellowship programme INPhINIT “la Caixa”. The selected candidates will have the opportunity of joining BSC’s research groups to carry out one of the research projects proposed. The doctoral fellowship programme INPhINIT “la Caixa” is devoted to attracting talented Early-Stage Researchers—of any nationality—who wish to pursue doctoral studies in Spanish or Portuguese territory.

BSC was selected for the Best HPC Response to Societal Plight (Urgent Computing, COVID-19). During the vetting for Paxlovid, University of Valencia researchers, led by the professor of physical chemistry Iñaki Tuñón used supercomputing to determine how the drug inhibits SARS-CoV-2. BSC was also selected for the Best HPC Collaboration for the RISC2 project, led by BSC, which aims to promote and improve the relationship between research and industrial communities between Europe and Latin America.

BSC has been awarded by the Foro de Empresas Innovadoras (FEI) with the Recognition to the organization supporting innovation in the 10th edition of the FEI 2022 Awards. The jury appreciated the BSC's promotion of the creation of an innovative productive network, its participation in international projects, its contribution to economic development and the welfare of society through the transfer of knowledge and technology, as well as the creation of work teams and research groups in which its inter-territorial character stands out.

A work carried out by researchers from CASE Department of BSC has received an HPC Innovation Excellence Award by Hyperion Research. The research, developed within the FF4EUROHPC iBAM experiment in collaboration with air quality mapping company Bettair, focused on mitigating the effects of air pollution on local communities by means of advanced Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques.