The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) was established in 2005 and serves as the Spanish national supercomputing facility.
The centre hosts MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe and its mission is to research, develop and manage information technologies in order to facilitate scientific progress. BSC is recognised as a first-class research centre in supercomputing and in scientific fields that demand it, such as Life and Earth Sciences and Engineering. BSC has over 350 staff from 41 countries engaged in multidisciplinary scientific collaboration and innovation.
BSC is a hosting member of the PRACE distributed supercomputing infrastructure and an active participant in HiPEAC, the ETP4HPC and other international forums such as BDEC. The centre develops technologies for Exascale within the BSC-led Mont-Blanc project, in the DEEP and DEEP-ER projects and the Human Brain Flagship project. BSC has also established joint research centres on Exascale with Intel and IBM. BSC also coordinated the RISC project to create a network of HPC research centres in Latin America and the EU. In 2011, BSC was one of only 8 Spanish research centres to be recognized by the national government as a “Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence” for its track record and research roadmap on computing and applications. BSC has collaborated with industry since its creation, and has participated in projects with companies such as ARM, Bull and Airbus as well as numerous SMEs. BSC has also established joint research centres with as Microsoft, NVIDIA and Spanish oil company Repsol. The centre has participated in over eighty EC Framework Programme research projects.
The Computer Sciences Department of the BSC focuses on building upon currently available hardware and software technologies and adapting them to make efficient use of supercomputing infrastructures. The department proposes novel architectures for processors and memory hierarchy and develops programming models and innovative implementation approaches for these models as well as tools for performance analysis and prediction. In addition, the department is working on resource management at various component levels (processor, memory, storage) and for different execution environments, including Grid and e-Business platforms and application optimization.
Role in NEXTGenIO
In the NEXTGenIO project, BSC leads the Systemware Development work package, which focuses on producing the software infrastructures and facilities required to use the new hardware architecture. This contribution includes developing appropriate job and data schedulers, new programming models and suitable data-storing models. Additionally, BSC actively participates in the architecture design and the efforts on enabling tools and applications for the new platform.