Aug. 31, 2020 — The European Commission (EC) has announced the set-up of new Centres of Excellence (CoEs) for High Performance Computer (HPC) applications and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) leads two, with a total budget of 10 million euros, and will participate in a third one. The new centers of excellence led by BSC are the Center of Excellence in Combustion (CoEC), and HPC/Exascale Centre of Excellence in Personalised Medicine (PerMedCoE). In addition, the BSC participates in the NOMAD2 Center for the Search for New Materials, which is led by the Max-Planck-Gessellschaft Zur Forderung Der Wissenschaften EV.

This announcement consolidates the presence of BSC in the HPC application centers of excellence promoted by the European Commission, since, out of a total of 13 centres, BSC coordinates four and participates in seven more. The other centers coordinated by BSC are CheEESE, specialized in simulations of the Earth’s sphere, and PoP, dedicated to optimization and code efficiency. In addition, he participates in Bioexcel2, CompBioMed, EoCoE, Esiwace2, Excellerat and Max.

Personalized Medicine

One of the new centres that the BSC will lead is PerMedCoE, whose objective is to make it possible to agilely combine computational models of biochemical and cellular processes with experimental validations.

Alfonso Valencia, director of the Life Sciences department at BSC, coordinates this center: “Together with coordinating the CoE in collaboration with the different communities, BSC will take care of the establishment of the infrastructure for the cell-based simulations, and will focus in particular in codesign tasks preparing for the new exascale architectures.”

Combustion

The other new center to be led by BSC is the Combustion Center of Excellence (CoEC), dedicated to exploiting Exascale computing technologies to address challenges related to combustion technologies. CoEC is aligned with the decarbonization goals of the European energy and transport sectors and with the European roadmap to achieve net-zero emissions of gas emissions by 2050.

Daniel Mira, propulsion technologies group leader, is coordinating the center of excellence in combustion: “Exascale technologies open a new paradigm in combustion science and BSC has taken the lead on the development of advanced simulation technologies to assist on the decarbonization of the power and transportation sectors.”

Novel Materials

NOMAD2, Novel Materials Discovery, the new center of excellence in which BSC participates, will specialize in developing a new level of materials modeling based on exascale computing and extreme- scale data hardware.

José María Cela, director of the department of Applications for science and engineering, coordinates the participation of BSC in this centre and says that “the role of BSC is mainly related to co-design activities of hardware and software. We will analyze how hardware accelerators help improve the performance of material modeling codes. Knowing how these codes behave is important, to improve the codes themselves, but also to provide valuable information to researchers who are developing European hardware for future exascale supercomputers, such as those of the European Processor Initiative (EPI) project”.

More about the centers of excellence (CoE)

The European Commission supports the establishment of centers of excellence for HPC applications that have been provisioned in the PPP (Public-Private Partnership) starting in 2015. The ultimate goal of this approach is the overall competitiveness of the HPC value chain in Europe, to the benefit of all applications of numerical simulation – scientific, industrial, societal – for which HPC is a tool, an essential approach and a potential source of direct or indirect jobs and innovations

Establishing a limited number of centers of excellence (CoE) is necessary to ensure EU competitiveness in the application of HPC for addressing scientific, industrial or societal challenges.

About BSC

Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the national supercomputing centre in Spain. The center is specialised in high performance computing (HPC) and manage MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, located in the Torre Girona chapel. BSC is involved in a number of projects to design and develop energy efficient and high performance chips, based on open architectures like RISC-V, for use within future exascale supercomputers and other high performance domains. The centre leads the pillar of the European Processor Project (EPI), creating a high performance accelerator based on RISC-V. More information: www.bsc.es

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Source: Barcelona Supercomputing Center