BSC-CNS Newsletter March 2023

The joint venture formed by the quantum computing startup Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech and the Spanish telecommunications group GMV will be in charge of building the first quantum computer of the Red Española de Supercomputación, which will be installed this year at BSC. This was announced last week during the MWC2023. This new quantum computer is promoted by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation through the SEDIA and coordinated by BSC.

BSC is one of the key participants in the development of the so-called digital twins of the Earth within the European Union (EU)’s Destination Earth initiative (DestinE). DestinE aims to find solutions to the climate change crisis. The goal is to develop highly accurate digital twins of the Earth system in order to predict the effects and build resilience to climate change.

The EU-funded SAFEXPLAIN project seeks to lay the foundation for Critical Autonomous AI-based Systems applications that are smarter and safer by ensuring that they adhere to functional safety requirements in environments that require quick and real-time response times that are increasingly run on the edge. This three-year project, coordinated by BSC, brings together a six-partner consortium representing academia and industry.

The European Federation for Cancer Images (EUCAIM) is a ground-breaking federated infrastructure deployment project aiming to power up imaging and AI towards precision medicine for Europe’s cancer patients and citizens. EUCAIM will address the fragmentation of existing cancer image repositories and establish a distributed Atlas of Cancer Imaging with over 60 million anonymised cancer image data from over 100,000 patients, accessible to clinicians, researchers and innovators across the EU.

The ITER organization and BSC have signed an agreement on academic and scientific cooperation that underlines the importance of promoting academic and scientific progress between the two institutions. Thus, boosting the training of young researchers and engineers by giving the possibility of joint supervision of PhD students and training and exchange of scientists and engineers. Among other possibilities, the door is also open for joint research projects on nuclear fusion.

The BSC researcher Marta Villegas has won the City of Barcelona Award 2022 in the category of experimental sciences and technology for the construction and development of natural language processing models for Catalan and Spanish, AINA and Maria, respectively. The jury considers that these projects "represent a decisive step in the preservation of the linguistic heritage of both languages in the Internet space, as well as progress in language technologies".

The director of the BSC, Mateo Valero, received two awards in Cuba. On the one hand, he was appointed Visiting Professor at the Central University "Marta Abreu" of Las Villas, and on the other hand, he was elected corresponding member of the Cuban Academy of Sciences. This last appointment is awarded to people linked to scientific-technical activity with relevant results and proven links and contributions to Cuban science.

BSC has been awarded the ESIC Catalunya Aster Prize for Digital Innovation. The jury has recognized BSC as the most important centre for digital innovation in Spain and one of the leading ones globally, with outstanding projects in the fields of earth sciences, health, digital technology, and materials. The award also considered the creation of around 100 jobs in spin-offs born at the BSC, and especially highlighted the MarIA and AINA project.

BSC has launched the fifth edition of Bojos per la Supercomputació and  the 2023 course will practically recover the format of the first two programs. A total of 17 sessions make up the proposal of the current programme. Some of the areas of this edition are quantum computing, parallelism, simulations, artificial intelligence, neural networks, climate change, genomics, drug analysis and sustainable mobility.

The Minister of Research and Universities of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Joaquim Nadal, visited the installation works of the new supercomputer MareNostrum 5 and highlighted the decisive participation of the BSC in the European manufacturing chip initiative. Nadal emphasized "the extraordinary level of excellence in the field of computing at the centre, which will continue to be a clear commitment in the future for the Catalan Government".