BSC-CNS Newsletter May 2022

The AINA project, promoted by the Catalan Government and BSC, launched a tour through Catalan-speaking territories with the aim of adding voices from the different dialectal variants of the Catalan language. In April the project was presented in Perpignan, Valencia and Palma de Mallorca. The AINA tour will continue before summertime with a second phase that will cover the whole of Catalonia.

After three years of research, the European-funded Center of Excellence for Exascale in Solid Earth (ChEESE), led by BSC, has succeeded in preparing simulation codes and applications as geohazard mitigation services that can be used to support the private and public sectors in decision-making related to earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis. The potential services, proven to run efficiently on present pre-exascale prototype supercomputers, were carried out as demonstrators in operational environments.

The PIXIL project has come to an end, becoming the first cross-border network (Spain-Andorra-France) for subsoil characterisation using geophysical imaging in the field of geothermal energy. Coordinated by BSC, the PIXIL project succeeded in connecting the academic and industrial sectors involved in geothermal energy, improved technologies and carried out application demonstrations that would not otherwise have been possible.

The ArcticXchange project, in partnership with the Arctic Centre in the University of Lapland (Finland), will explore how climate predictions for the next weeks and months can inform the planning and management practices of reindeer herders. ArcticXchange partners will co-develop a case study for reindeer husbandry in Finnish Lapland.

The Minister of Science and Innovation, Diana Morant, visited the chapel where the MareNostrum 4 supercomputer is housed and the recently finished facilities that will host MareNostrum 5, in which the Spanish Government has invested more than €52M. Morant referred to BSC as a "model of international prestige in the field of supercomputing" and highlighted its important contribution to attracting and retaining scientific talent in our country.

The HomE (Enabling Homomorphic Encryption of Deep Neural Network Models and Datasets in Production Environments) project aims at enabling the feasibility of privacy-preserving machine learning in untrusted environments such as cloud services. HomE will put together HPC software optimization techniques and novel hardware designs, on top of Persistent Memory technology, to enable production-sized scenarios of homomorphically-encrypted deep learning.

The Director of BSC has been awarded the first Honorary Doctorate in Engineering and Architecture by the University Cristóbal Colón, Veracruz (Mexico). The university recognizes "his extraordinary contribution to the field of computing and his outstanding commitment to using information technologies at the service, development and welfare of society".

BSC has been awarded the Catalonian National Research Award for scientific communication for the "We are Young Researchers" project. The Catalan Government and the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation have recognized the work of BSC to make STEM areas attractive for middle school students, with special emphasis on girls, thus contributing to reduce the gender gap in these fields.