BSC-CNS Newsletter March 2022

Researchers from BSC and the Germans Trias Research Institute (IGTP) have produced the first haplotype map for the Iberian population: a tool that will produce a better understanding of the genetic changes behind many common diseases. The panel will allow researchers using low-cost sequencing techniques to improve the discovery and interpretation of the genetic changes behind common diseases more easily.

Unprecedented emission reductions are needed throughout Europe to comply with the new 2021 World Health Organization  Air Quality Guidelines, according to a new article led by scientists from BSC published in Environmental Research Letters. The study quantifies the increase in the percentage of measurement stations that exceed each new air quality guideline across all the countries reporting air quality information to the European Environmental Agency.

A collaborative international study led by scientists at the Met Office and published in Nature Communications,  is helping to quell a long-running scientific debate about how the ongoing decline of Arctic sea ice, driven by climate change, can affect the European winters. Two BSC researchers are involved in the study and contributed to the interpretation of the results, Dr. Xavier Levine, who in addition produced the experiments, and Dr. Pablo Ortega, the Climate prediction group coleader.

BSC participates in the Carbolytics project, which seeks to investigate the ecological footprint of the ecosystem of advertising technology of which the best known are advertising cookies. The artist and researcher Joana Moll is responsible for Carbolytics and aims to draw attention to the social and environmental costs of the data collection carried out by these corporations.

Coordinated by BSC, the MASTECS project (Multicore Analysis Service and Tools for Embedded Critical Systems) has developed the first certification-ready timing analysis solution capable of handling the complexity of safety-critical multicore systems. The technology developed and consolidated within the project is now enabling the use of multicore processors in aerospace and automotive domains.

The BSC project NextSim,funded by the EuroHPC JU and supported by the research and innovation programmes of Spain, France and Germany, is working to develop the next generation of Computational Fluid Dynamics tools for extreme-scale parallel computing platforms. The tools will enable the aerospace industry to solve problems currently out of reach within the constraints of balancing accuracy versus computational load.

The main objective of the RISC2 project is to promote and improve the relationship between the research and industrial communities of Europe and Latin America, focusing on HPC applications and infrastructures implementation. The project, led by BSC, has brought together the leading European and Latin American stakeholders in HPC, by promoting the interaction between researchers and policy-makers from both regions.

The Barcelona Dust Regional Center has launched a new website with a more intuitive design that seeks to offer an improved user experience. The new website is the result of the fruitful collaboration carried out over the last three years and seeks to improve the user experience through a new, more intuitive and organic design; at a high level of usability, the new website will facilitate access to observation and prediction products as well as information on research and training activities.

Two researchers from the Earth Sciences department have been appointed ICREA Research Professors in its latest call. Rachel Lowe’s research involves modelling the impact of environmental change on infectious disease epidemics, to inform disease control and prevention strategies. Markus Donat is a climate researcher with focus on understanding and predicting how extreme climate events such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall and storms will change in the coming years and decades.

BSC researcher Leonidas Kosmidis has won a HiPEAC Technology Transfer Award for the second time. His winning technology, ‘GPU4S Bench: An open GPU benchmarking suite for space on-board processing’, provides a resource to help assess the suitability of new high-performance devices such as graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing tasks usually found in space applications.

Researchers from the Earth Sciences department have won the second prize in the Challenge to improve sub-seasonal to seasonal predictions using artificial intelligence. The WMO launched this initiative that aims to improve, through artificial intelligence and/or machine learning, the current precipitation and temperature forecasts for 3 and 6 weeks into the future from the best computational fluid dynamics models available today.

The exhibition includes the results of the Barcelona Deep Collage Festival, held in October at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center during the Festa Major of the Les Corts district. Works by 20 visual artists in physical format are presented; projected works by creators and students of art and design schools; the creations of ED, an artificial intelligence program that generates collage images inspired by the works of artists, and the audiovisual that emerged from the experience of those days. The exhibition can be visited until March 11 at the Les Corts Exhibition Center.