BSC-CNS Newsletter September 2018

MareNostrum and the Macedònia have teamed up to attract girls to technology

The supercomputer and the Macedònia song titled MareNostrum are two key parts of tours that 6,000 primary school students from Barcelona will be able to go on this year. The aim is to encourage children to study tech subjects and, in particular, to appeal to girls. The tours focus on making clear that girls can use supercomputers and enjoy doing so.

BSC software makes Lenovo's new set of cooling technologies more energy efficient

BSC has contributed towards the creation of a new set of Lenovo cooling technologies that can allow data centres to run up to 50% more efficiently, without hindering performance or density. BSC has participated in this new release with its Energy Aware Runtime (EAR) software, as part of the BSC-Lenovo collaboration project.

BSC launches a spin-off to simulate medical devices in “virtual humans”

ELEM Biotech will allow companies of medical technologies, pharmaceuticals, CROs and doctors to perform virtual simulations for the personalized treatment of some diseases. In a first step, this new biotech company will be focused on the modelling of the respiratory and cardiovascular systems, although in the long-term Elem’s vision is to progressively move to all organs and systems.

BSC and Nearby Sensor launch a new technology company in the fields of IoT and 5G

Nearby Computing SL aims at developing advanced orchestration services for a massive deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT). These services allow for both companies and public institutions the automation of computing processing in the edge for the IoT and 5G networks. It will provide personalized services for different MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) and Fog Computing scenarios.

BSC and IAAC join forces to create an urban simulator and promote "the science of making cities"

BSC and the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) have signed an agreement to implement supercomputing technology to assess the resilience of cities. They will work on the creation of a digital platform that allows the simulation of cities in order to evaluate any urban plan, project or initiative and thus promote more efficient urban development with positive impact.

Predicting fires at a global scale month in advance is feasible

UB with the collaboration of BSC researchers have worked on a new system to improve the predictions of fire risks related to climate causes. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, uses the seasonal forecast of variables such as temperature and rain to predict the extension of the burnt area during the different seasons of the year at a global scale.

What is the maximum possible number of Atlantic tropical cyclones?

In a multi-national collaborative study published in Science Advances, scientists from the CSIRO, the University of Melbourne and BSC found the record number of tropical cyclones that occurred over the North Atlantic in 2005 (28 storms) is close to the maximum number that might occur in this region given existing climate conditions. This information is useful for risk management.

BSC develops code for NVIDIA CUDA toolkit to accelerate computation up to four times

BSC researchers have developed a code called cuThomasBatch that is 3× (in double precision) and 4× (in single precision) faster than its counterpart cuSparse routine (gtsvStridedbatch) with a relatively large number of tridiagonal systems. This code has been integrated into the cuSPARSE library, as part of the new routine gtsvInterleavedBatch.

OmpSs@FPGA on track to become embedded systems programming standard

Researchers at BSC and UPC have developed a flexible, efficient, simple programming model for embedded systems. OmpsSs@FPGA adapts OmpSs to field-programming gate arrays (FPGAs), processors which are gaining increasing popularity for applications such as in the Internet of Things (IoT). During the AXIOM project, a team of BSC-UPC researchers made OmpSs@FPGA operational for embedded devices.

Two researchers get a Junior Leader “la Caixa” fellowship to develop their research at BSC

Eduard Porta, researcher of the Life Sciences department and Martí Galí, a researcher taken recently up into the Earth Sciences department at BSC, have been selected to be part of the Junior Leader “la Caixa” programme. Of the 20 Incoming fellowships awarded in this first edition of the programme two of them will fund BSC research.