MareNostrum 5, the highest EU investment in a research infrastructure in Spain

On 7 June, the European Commission (EC) has officially announced that EuroHPC has selected Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) as one of the institutions that will host a pre-exascale supercomputer in the high-capacity supercomputer network that will operate in the EU in 2021. The EC announcement describes the plan to acquire 3 pre-exascale machines with a peak performance of at least 150 Petaflops: Barcelona (Spain), Bolonia (Italy) and Kajaani (Finland).

The future MareNostrum 5 will be a heterogenous supercomputer that will achieve a peak performance of 200 Petaflops (200 · 1015 of operations per second), which is 18 times more than current MareNostrum 4.

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CASE Retreat 2019, with a photo contest

CASE members in Altafulla during the Annual Retreat.

Last week the Annual Retreat of the CASE department of BSC, to which the Fusion group belongs, was held in Altafulla, Tarragona, Spain. The event lasted two days and gathered the group members in a relaxing environment at the Mediterranean seaside. Prof. José María Cela, head of the Department, presented an overview of the current situation of CASE and the future research paths to be developed within the team. Later, the two spin-offs stemming from CASE, MITIGA and Elem Biotech, were introduced showing how our research can reach the market.

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Fusion at the BSC Doctoral Symposium

The 6th BSC Doctoral Symposium took place last week in the campus of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. Over the three days the event lasted, numerous students and postdoc researchers presented their work on a wide range of areas related to Computing: from simulations in Fusion, Bio-engineering, Data Analysis and Machine Learning to HPC techniques and algorithms in Computer Science.

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Innovation and economical opportunities in Fusion

Last Tuesday the 11th edition of KIMconference took place at the L’Auditori Cuatrecasas in Barcelona. With the title “KIMconference2019 Tangibilizando la innovación“, the event attracted entrepreneurs, politicians, private and public sector including fusion experts to discuss and learn about innovation.

The conference had a dedicated section in the field of fusion energy. The first talk of this section was given by Dr Carlos Hidalgo from CIEMAT. He introduced the topic of fusion to the audience and the great scientific and technological challenges that have to be overcome in the coming years. In the second talk, Dr Victor Sáez from Fusion for Energy focused on the contracts won by European companies for the ITER construction. So far, about 6.000M€ have been invested on contracts and about 2.000M€ more will be spent in the coming years.

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